There is an eternal debate going on in virtual platform land over what the right kind of abstraction is for each job. Depending on background, people favor different levels. For those with a hardware background, more details tend to be the comfort zone, while for those with a software background like myself, we are quite comfortable with less details. I recently did some experiments about the use of quite low levels of hardware modeling details for early architecture exploration and system specification.
Tag Archives: Linux
Three Cores make a Crowd — or a Problem
A common question from simulation users to us simulation providers is “can I simulate a machine with N cores”, where N is “large”. As if running lots of cores was a simulation system or even a hardware problem. In almost all cases, the problem is with software. Creating an arbitrary configuration in a virtual platform is easy. Creating a software stack for that arbitrary platform is a lot harder, since an SMP software stack needs to understand about the cores and how they communicate.
Essentially, what you need is a hardware design that has addressing room for lots of cores, and a software stack that is capable of using lots of cores — even if such configurations do not exist in hardware. Unfortunately, since software is normally written to run on real existing machines, there tends to be unexpected limitations even where scalability should be feasible “in principle”.
Here is the story of how I convinced Linux to handle more than two cores in a virtual MPC8641D machine.
Eclipse Linux Kernel Indexing Works
Edited on 2009-Feb-01, to include the link to the illustrated guide that really helps you get there faster. Thanks Simon! Also, promoted to front page, original post was put up on 2008-Nov-09.
Thanks to Simon Kågströms post (and the even better second-generation with screenshots) about using Eclipse for the Linux kernel, I have a much nicer work environment now for my ongoing work in learning Linux device drivers on PowerPC, which has helped me work my way through several hard-to-figure-out system calls. Read More →
Shaking a Linux Device Driver on a Virtual Platform
To continue from last week’s post about my Linux device driver and hardware teaching setup in Simics, here is a lesson I learnt this week when doing some performance analysis based on various hardware speeds.
Learning Linux Device Drivers on a Virtual PowerPC
There are times when working with virtual hardware and not real hardware feels very liberating and efficient (not to mention safe). Bringing up, modifying, and extending operating systems is one obvious such case. Recently, I have been preparing an open-source-based demonstration and education systems based on embedded PowerPC machines, and teaching myself how to do Linux device drivers in the process. This really brought out the best in virtual platform use.
Hardware Debug Support & LinuxLink PodCast
The TimeSys Embedded Linux Podcast (also called LinuxLink Radio) is a nice listen about embedded computing using Linux. Sometimes they are a bit too open-source centric, though, and ignore very good tools that live in the classic commercial world. One such example is the recent episode 20 on debugging tools, where they totally ignore modern high-powered hardware-based debugging.
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