I am just finishing off reading the chapters of the Processor and System-on-Chip Simulation book (where I was part of contributing a chapter), and just read through the chapter about the Tensilica instruction-set simulator (ISS) solutions written by Grant Martin, Nenad Nedeljkovic and David Heine. They have a slightly different architecture from most other ISS solutions, since that they have an inherently variable target in the configurable and extensible Tensilica cores. However, the more interesting part of the chapter was the discussion on system modeling beyond the core. In particular, how they deal with interrupts to the core in the context of a temporally decoupled simulation.
Monthly Archives: February 2011
Interrupts and Temporal Decoupling
Wind River Blog: Working Smarter, not Harder
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you can use a virtual platform to complete work faster. Not by making the virtual platform execution of target code faster, but by optimizing the way you work and taking advantage of the features of a virtual platform.
Evaluating HAVEGE Randomness
I previously blogged about the HAVEGE algorithm that is billed as extracting randomness from microarchitectural variations in modern processors. Since it was supposed to rely on hardware timing variations, I wondered what would happen if I ran it on Simics that does not model the processor pipeline, caches, and branch predictor. Wouldn’t that make the randomness of HAVEGE go away?
Execution Time is Random, How Useful
When I was working on my PhD in WCET – Worst-Case Execution Time analysis - our goal was to utterly precisely predict the precise number of cycles that a processor would take to execute a certain piece of code. We and other groups designed analyses for caches, pipelines, even branch predictors, and ways to take into account information about program flow and variable values.
The complexity of modern processors – even a decade ago – was such that predictability was very difficult to achieve in practice. We used to joke that a complex enough processor would be like a random number generator.
Funnily enough, it turns out that someone has been using processors just like that. Guess that proves the point, in some way.
Wind River Blog: Being Helpful or Being Correct?
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about warnings in virtual platforms. It is an art to add good warnings to virtual platform models, and just being correct visavi the hardware behavior is not necessarily that helpful for a software developer. A virtual platform should warn about suspicious operations, even if they are technically “correct”.
I also have to apologize for the slow blogging in January of 2011. There was too much going on at work and quite a few days taking care of sick kids. Hopefully, the pace can improve going forward.