I just got a wonderful error message from Firefox 3.5.2:
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Another Layer of Virtual Indirection
After a long break, this is another blog post in the series of “how to do modeling for virtual platforms”. The previous installments dealt with checkpointing and determinism.
This post is about the use of indirection in a model to increase its flexibility and ease of use, at the cost of a bit more work for the first model to be created.In particular, indirection in the sense of having explicit objects in a simulation to represent things like networks and cables connecting virtual machines.
A Toast to Abstraction Layers
I just found “The Toaster Project“, a Royal College of Art project where Thomas Twaites built a simple toaster from scratch. Really from scratch, going all they way back to iron ore and raw petroleum. In the process, he had to smelt ore, create plastic from petroleum, etc. It is a very interesting observation about the immense industrial complexity behind the very simple everyday items of our lives. I also think it has something to tell us computer scientists about abstraction.
Can we Rely on C?
I have written several times on this blog about the odd propensity of the “EDA” business to consider the C and C++ languages “high level” languages. They are what I use almost daily for most of the demo-order programming I do, but I still don’t consider them very high-level. High-level for me is scripting (Python, Lua, …) or domain-specific languages (DML, Lex, Yacc, MatLab, …) or model-driven development (UML, LabView, Simulink, …) or languages which at least provide sensible and reasonably safe semantics (Erlang, Java, …).
However, in fact, most the embedded industry and the “virtual platform” industry rely on C and C++ to get our daily jobs done. Question is, how much longer can we expect to do that? An interesting post at Embedded.com by Michael Barr brought back my argument that modeling needs to move up in levels of abstraction just like mainstream programming.
Checkpointing in SystemC @ FDL
Along with Marius Monton and Mark Burton of GreenSocs, I will be presenting a paper on checkpointing and SystemC at the FDL, Forum on Specification and Design Languages, in late September 2009.
The paper will explain how we did Simics-style checkpointing in SystemC, using the GreenSocs GreenConfig mechanisms to obtain an approximation for the Simics attribute system.
Downloadable Book about Embedded Multicore
Freescale has now released the collected, updated, and restyled book version of the article series on embedded multicore that I wrote last year together with Patrik Strömblad of Enea, and Jonas Svennebring, and John Logan of Freescale. The book covers the basics of multicore software and hardware, as well as operating systems issues and virtual platforms. Obviously, the virtual platform part was my contribution.