Since I have a certain interest in debugging, I was happy find the article “Guidelines for SystemC – Debugger Integration” at the usually interesting Design and Reuse website. However, I must say that it was pretty disappointing.
Tag Archives: Systemc
Disappointing SystemC Debugger Integration Paper
Parallel SystemC Simulation
I just found a recent paper on the topic of parallel simulation of computer systems. Christopher Schumacher et al., published an articles at CODES+ISSS in October of 2010 talking about “parSC: Synchronous Parallel SystemC Simulation on Multicore Architectures“. Essentially, parallel SystemC.
S4D 2010
Looks like S4D (and the co-located FDL) is becoming my most regular conference. S4D is a very interactive event. With some 20 to 30 people in the room, many of them also presenting papers at the conference, it turns into a workshop at its best. There were plenty of discussion going on during sessions and the breaks, and I think we all got new insights and ideas.
CoWare SystemC Checkpointing
Continuing on my series of posts about checkpointing in virtual platforms (see previous posts Simics, Cadence, our FDL paper), I have finally found a decent description of how CoWare does things for SystemC. It is pretty much the same approach as that taken by Cadence, in that it uses full stores a complete process state to disk, and uses special callbacks to handle the connection to open files and similar local resources on a system. The approach is described in a paper called “A Checkpoint/Restore Framework for SystemC-Based Virtual Platforms”, by Stefan Kraemer and Reiner Leupers of RWTH Aachen, and Dietmar Petras, and Thomas Philipp of CoWare, published at the International Symposium on System-on-Chip, in Tampere, Finland, in October of 2009.
FDL Impressions
This is end of the second day of FDL 2009, and it is proving to be quite an interesting experience. The location is very bad, apart from the weather (coming from a Swedish Fall where temperatures are dropping towards 10 C, to a sunny 27 C is quite nice). But Sophia Antipolis is just a tech park with some hotels, and you cannot get anywhere interesting or civilized without a car. No shops, no restaurants except for hotels, and so sidewalks in parts.
But the conference is good enough to be worth the bodily discomforts. And I did find a nice Parcours Sportif for the morning run, as well as a nice breakfast buffet at the Mercure Hotel.
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.
The TLM DAC
The past few days here at DAC, a big theme has been transaction level modeling (TLM).
TLM is often considered to be SystemC TLM-2.0. Most of the statements from the EDA companies are to the effect that SystemC TLM-2.0 solves the problem of combining models from different sources. Scratching the surface of this happy picture, it is clear that it is not that simple…
Cadence SystemC Checkpointing
I while ago I wrote a blog post on checkpointing in virtual platforms, and what it is good for. Checkpointing has been a fairly rare feature in virtual platform tools for some reason, but it seems to be picking up some implementations. In particular, I recently noticed that Cadence added it to their simulator solutions a while ago (2007 according to their blog posts). There are a two blog posts by George Frazier of Cadence (“saving boot time” and “advanced usage“) that offer some insight into what is going on.
Threading or Not as a Hardware Modeling Paradigm
Traditional hardware design languages like Verilog were designed to model naturally concurrent behavior, and they naturally leaned on a concept of threads to express this. This idea of independent threads was brought over into the design of SystemC, where it was manifested as cooperative multitasking using a user-level threading package. While threads might at first glance look “natural” as a modeling paradigm for hardware simulations, it is really not a good choice for high-performance simulation.
In practice, threading as a paradigm for software models of hardware circuits connected to a programmable processor brings more problems than it provides benefits in terms of “natural” modeling.
Notes from the IP 08 Panel
Now I am home again, and some days have passed since the IP 08 panel discussion about software and hardware virtual platforms. This was an EDA hardware-oriented conference, and thus the audience was quite interested in how to tie things to hardware design. Any case, it was a fun panel, and Pierre Bricaud did a good job of moderating and keeping things interesting.