There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how Simics sessions are started and the mechanics of system setups in Simics. It also has a link to a Youtube video demonstrating various ways of starting Simics simulation sessions.
Tag Archives: Simics
Wind River Blog: Starting & Configuring Simics
Wind River Blog:
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, with a video demo of the new Simics 4.8 System Editor function. Posts are coming out quite quickly now, with various aspects of Simics and in particular Simics 4.8 being highlighted. This particular feature is probably the biggest news in Simics 4.8 from a user interface perspective, as it allows you to (finally) inspect a target setup in a nice graphical tree view.
Nudge Theory and Graphical User Interfaces
Nudge theory is an intriguing fairly new take on how to manage societies and modulate the behavior of people to make them behave in a “better” way. My layman’s interpretation of the idea is that instead of threating punishment and setting up rules, you try to encourage desired behavior with rewards and discourage undesired behavior by making it require an effort. When working with the new Test Runner view in the Simics 4.8 GUI, I realized that we had invented exactly such a nudge.
Wind River Blog: Collaborating with Recording Checkpoints
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how some new features in Simics 4.8 improve the collaboration power of Simics checkpoints. For the first time, Simics checkpoint can now carry a piece of history (slice of time), which also makes reverse execution and reverse debug work with checkpoints in a logical way.
Wind River Blog: Simics 4.8 is Here
Simics 4.8 is finally released, and I put up a blog post explaining the most important news in this release. It is two years since we released Simics 4.6, so there is quite a bit of news in Simics 4.8 – even though lots of functionality has been released continuously into 4.6 over the past twenty four months. My personal favorite are the comments you can put on an execution and the stop log, but then again, that might be because they have been a couple of pet ideas of mine so I am hardly an impartial judge. Everything else is also really good, and the engineering teams and marketing teams involved have put in a lot of effort into this release (as we do in all releases).
Wind River Blog: Visuality NQ CIFS Server on Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how I ran a Windows file share server (CIFS) on a Simics-simulated VxWorks big-endian Power Architecture target. Something that just should work, given that the software in question is known to work in the real world. But still, pretty cool, and a bit eerie.
Wind River Blog: TCF and Simics
On my Wind River blog, you can now find a description on how we have used the Eclipse TCF (target connection framework) to build the Simics GUI. Or rather, the connection between the Simics GUI and the Simics simulation process. It is actually quite revolutionary what you can do with the TCF, compared to older debug protocols. In particular, TCF lets you combine many different services across a single connection.
Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging
Last year, I did a Simics webinar which included a two-part demo of how to use Simics to debug an endianness bug in a networked system as it migrates from big-endian to a little-endian system. Along the way, I also showed off various Simics features like reverse execution and checkpointing and scripted execution.
The demo is now online at the Wind River Youtube channel, and the setup is explained in a blog post at the Wind River company blog which is worth reading before watching the video.
Wind River Blog: Debugging Simics using Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, telling the story of how some of the Simics developers used Simics itself to debug an intermittent Simics program crash caused by a timing-sensitive race condition.
Running Simics on itself is pretty cool, and shows the power of the simulator and its applicability even to really complex software.
Wind River Blog: Simics and Flying Piggies
I just added a new blog post at the Wind River blog, about determinism and illustrating Simics-style determinism is by looking at the game Bad Piggies. Games and simulators have quite a lot in common, actually.
Wind River Blog: Exposing OS Kernel Races with Landslide
There is a new blog post on my Wind River blog, about the Landslide system from CMU. It is a pretty impressive Master’s Thesis project that used the control that Simics has over interrupts to systematically try different OS kernel thread interleavings to find concurrency bugs. The blog is an interview with Ben Blum, the student who did the work. Ben is now a PhD student, and I bet that he will continue to generate cool stuff in the future.
Speaking at Embedded Conference Scandinavia
I am going to be talking about how to transport bugs with virtual platform checkpoints, in the Software Tools track at the Embedded Conference Scandinavia, on October 3, 2012, in Stockholm (Sweden). The ECS is a nice event, and there are several tracks to choose from both on October 2 and October 3. In addition to the tracks, Jan Bosch from Chalmers is going to present a keynote that I am sure will be very entertaining (see my notes from a presentation he did in Göteborg last year).
Wind River Blog: Testing Multicore Scaling with a Simics QSP
A few years ago, I built a demo on Simics that used a hacked Freescale MPC8641D target that was forced to scale from 1 to 8 cores. Some interesting experiements could be made using this target, and it was nicely scalable for its time. However, I always wanted to have something just a bit bigger. Say 20 cores, or 100. Just to see what would happen. Finally, I got it.
The Simics QSP target that we quietly launched earlier this Summer is such a scalable target. As discussed in a blog post describing the architecture, it is designed to scale to 128 cores currently. Using this ability, I repeated my old experiments, but trying very large threads counts and target core counts. The results show clearly that the way that I coded my parallel computation program was pretty bad, and I really would like to try to rewrite it using some more modern threading library. All I need is time and a way to cross-compile Wool…
Anyway, the new blog post is here.
Wind River Blog: Inside the Simics QSP – Additional Notes
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the design and technical contents of the new Simics Quick Start Platforms, more widely known as the QSP. The blog describes the virtual-only hardware that forms part of the QSP, and how it was designed. It is interesting to note that the hardware ended up a bit more complex that I initially thought it would be, since an ideal virtual platform should be very simple. Right? Turns out an OS complicates things.
Youtube Movie on Reverse Execution (and a small bit of Reverse Debug)
We just uploaded a short movie about reverse execution and reverse debugging to Youtube, to the Wind River official channel. In the short time available in this demo, we really only show reverse execution. Reverse debug, as I define it, is not used much at all, as explaining what goes on when you start to put breakpoints into a program and analyze its behavior takes a surprising amount of time.
Wind River Blog: Teaching Networking with Simics
On the Wind River corporate blog, I have put up a blog post about how Wind River Education Services is going to use Simics to teach networking. What is interesting with this approach is that it shows how a virtual platform can be used for tasks like teaching that don’t have much to do with hardware modeling or similar “typical” VP uses. In this case, the key value is encapsulation of a set of machines running real operating systems and software stacks, and with lots of networks connecting them.
Wind River Blog: Forcing Rare Bugs to Appear using Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how a team of researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln is using Simics to force rare bugs to manifest themselves as errors. They used Simics to control a target system to force it into rare situations much more likely to trigger latent bugs, requiring far fewer test runs compared to just randomly rerunning tests again and again and hoping to see a bug.
Wind River Blog: 80186 and 8051
Wind River recently added a couple of new processor models to Simics: the 30-year-old 80186 and the 32-year-old 8051.
I have a blog post about this up on the Wind River tools blog. Pretty amazing to see us model an eight bit machine in 2012 – just proves how long-lived some hardware systems are.
Wind River Blog: Crystal Forest on Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about Simics running a model of the new Intel Crystal Forest platform. Crystal Forest is a very complex piece of hardware, but I am pretty happy that we managed to demo it in an understandable way – by essentially using it as a black box and putting a pretty display on top of that (using Eclipse).
Wind River Blog: Fault Injection with Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you actually do fault injection in Simics. This particular post is pretty detailed, showing the actual architecture of a fault injector in Simics, not just “yes you can do it”. It includes actual diagrams of system components and how you can insert fault injection into an existing system, so it is a bit more technical than most my Wind River blog posts that tend to be more conceptual.
Reverse History Part Three – Products
In this final part of my series on the history of reverse debugging I will look at the products that launched around the mid-2000s and that finally made reverse debugging available in a commercially packaged product and not just research prototypes. Part one of this series provided a background on the technology and part two discussed various research papers on the topic going back to the early 1970s. The first commercial product featuring reverse debugging was launched in 2003, and then there have been a steady trickle of new products up until today.
Post updated 2012-09-28 with a revised history.
Wind River Blog: Interview with a Networked Simics User
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, an interview with Dan Poirot at RTI who is using Simics to model and test heterogeneous, distributed, networked systems.
EETimes Articles on Simics
I just had two articles published the Embedded Design part of the EETimes.
First, “Rethink your project planning with a virtual platform“, which talks about how virtual platforms can change your entire project planning. Essentially, by reducing project friction and risks related to hardware availability, software integration, and show-stopper bugs, you can make projects work much better.
Then we have “Transporting bugs with virtual checkpoints“, which is a shorter, popular science, version of the paper I published last year at S4D. This describes how you can use checkpointing in a virtual platform to communicate bugs across time, space, and teams.
Wind River Blog: A Virtual Year
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about hypersimulation in virtual platforms and how it lets virtual time fly much faster than real time. It was the result of simple mistake of leaving Simics running in the background as I did other work on my machine.
Wind River Blog: How to Get Virtual
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you build virtual platforms with Simics. The post is more about the methodology than the nature of models, cycle accuracy, endianness, and all the other details of virtual platform modeling. I have written about modeling methodology on this blog too, and in particular I would recommend looking at “Two perspectives on modeling“.
Wind River Blog: Simics 4.6 Initial Impressions
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the new Simics 4.6 release. 4.6 has some serious new goodies in it, including an Eclipse source-code debugger and a way to build blinking lights front panels for boards.
Wind River Blog: 20, 30, 60 years ago
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about some computing history. Wind River turns thirty this year, Simics twenty, and simulation for debug (and probably debug in general) turns sixty. Computing has come a long way.
Wind River Blog: VxWorks 64-bit using Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how Simics was used to kick-start the development of the 64-bit version of VxWorks. It is an interesting example of how to use a virtual platform as a model of something much simpler and gentler than actual hardware systems.
Wind River Blog: “IMA on Simics”
I have a fairly lengthy new blog post at my Wind River blog. This time, I interview Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux, a Canadian MSc student who have done some very smart things with Simics. His research is in IMA, Integrated Modular Avionics, and how to make that work on multicore.
Wind River Blog: “Virtual Basil Fawlty”
Last week, I posted a discussion about fault injection in virtual systems, using Basil Fawlty as the perfect example of a fault injection agent.