• About Jakob Engblom and this blog
Observations from Uppsala Computer Simulation, Virtual Platforms, Embedded Programming, Multicore and More (by Jakob Engblom)

Tag Archives: Vmware

Reverse History Part Three – Products

2012 January 8 21:51 / 4 Comments / Jakob

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.

Read More →

Tweet
Posted in: history of computing, programming / Tagged: debugging, gdb, Green Hills, Lauterbach, Multi, reverse debugging, reverse execution, Simics, TotalView, UndoDB, VMWare

Driving an Old Canon Scanner using a VM

2009 July 15 19:43 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

lide30I have an old Canon LIDE 30 scanner that I purchased sometime late in 2003. At that time, it was connected to a PC running Windows XP, and drivers worked just fine. However, after I got my new computer in early 2009, with Vista 64, there are no more drivers available. There is a funny way around this though, using a virtual machine.

Read More →

Tweet
Posted in: desktop software, virtual machines / Tagged: Canon, LIDE30, scanner, USB, virtualization, Vista, VMWare, Windows, XP

Simulation Determinism: Necessary or Evil?

2009 April 19 21:36 / 1 Comment / Jakob

gearsIn my series (well, I have one previous post about checkpointing) about misunderstood simulation technology items, the turn has come to the most difficult of all it seems: determinism. Determinism is often misunderstood as meaning “unchanging” or “constant” behavior of the simulation. People tend to assume that a deterministic simulation will not reveal errors due to nondeterministic behavior or races in the modeled system, which is a complete misunderstanding. Determinism is a necessary feature of any simulation system that wants to be really helpful to its users, not an evil that hides errors.

Read More →

Tweet
Posted in: computer simulation technology, multicore debug, programming, virtual platforms / Tagged: debugging, determinism, multicore, repeatability, reverse execution, Simics, VMWare

Checkpointing: Meaningless, Difficult, or just Overlooked?

2009 April 9 20:56 / 9 Comments / Jakob

gears1One thing that surprises me is how rare the feature of checkpointing or snapshotting is in the land of virtual platforms, despite the obvious benefits of that feature. Indeed, checkpointing was one of the first cool things demonstrated to me when I joined Virtutech back in 2002. Today, I could not ever imagine doing without it. Not having checkpointing is like having a word processor where you only get to save once, when your document is finished, with no option of saving intermediate states.

But not everyone seems to consider this an important feature, judging from its relative rarity in the world of EDA and virtual platforms. Why is this? Let’s look at some possible explanations.

Read More →

Tweet
Posted in: computer simulation technology, programming, virtual platforms / Tagged: Checkpointing, Macintosh, Mambo, Simics, VMWare, ZX Spectrum

VMM Detection Myths and Realities from a Simics and Embedded Perspective

2008 April 20 02:02 / 3 Comments / Jakob

It must have been Google Alerts that send me a link to the HOTOS 2007 (Hot Topics in Operating Systems) paper by Tal Garfinkel, Keith Adams, Andrew Warfield, and Jason Franklin called Compatibility is not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities. This paper is slightly less than a year old today, so it is old by blog standards and quite recent by research paper standards. It deals with the interesting problem of whether a virtual machine can be made undetectable by software running on it — and software that is trying to detect it. Their conclusion is that it is not feasible, and I agree with that. The reason WHY that is the case can use some more discussion, though… and here is my take on that issue from a Simics/embedded systems virtualization perspective.

Read More →

Tweet
Posted in: computer simulation technology, security, virtual machines, virtualization / Tagged: Andrew Warfield, HOTOS, Jason Franklin, Keith Adams, Simics, Tal Garfinkel, Temporal decoupling, Timing attack, Virtual machine detection, VMWare

Recent Posts

  • Wind River Blog: Simics 4.8 is Here
  • A Few Electrons too Many
  • Wind River Blog: Visuality NQ CIFS Server on Simics
  • Everything in the Cloud?
  • Wind River Blog: TCF and Simics
  • Off-Topic: Moving Bad Piggies Save Games
  • Two Cores, Four Cores, Eight Cores – Mobile Variety
  • Bliss: Failing to Pivot for Ideology
  • Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging
  • Simulation vs Reality in Schlock Mercenary
  • Programming like Lego
  • Does ISA Matter for Performance?
  • Wind River Blog: Debugging Simics using Simics
  • Wind River Blog: Simics and Flying Piggies
  • Dragons can be Useful – when AT Models Make Sense

Categories

  • appearances (30)
  • articles (21)
  • blogging (10)
  • books (6)
  • business issues (31)
  • computer architecture (35)
  • conferences (34)
  • EDA (50)
    • ESL (35)
  • embedded (78)
    • embedded software (57)
    • embedded systeme (50)
  • general research (6)
  • history (32)
    • general history (7)
    • history of computing (26)
  • off-topic (94)
    • biking (5)
    • board games (1)
    • computer games (3)
    • desktop software (35)
    • food and drink (1)
    • funny (12)
    • gadgets (24)
    • Politics (3)
    • popular culture (5)
    • trains (5)
    • transportation (10)
    • travel (10)
    • websites (3)
  • parallel computing (92)
    • multicore computer architecture (51)
    • multicore debug (22)
    • multicore software (65)
  • programming (107)
  • review (8)
  • security (19)
  • teaching (7)
  • testing (9)
  • uncategorized (12)
  • virtual things (129)
    • computer simulation technology (68)
    • virtual machines (17)
    • virtual platforms (98)
    • virtualization (14)
  • Wind River Blog (40)

Tags

ARM blog commentary Cadence Checkpointing clock-cycle models Communications of the ACM computer architecture conference cycle accuracy debugging DML Domain-specific languages embedded freescale G900 heterogeneous homogeneous IBM Intel iPod lego linux mobile phones multicore off-topic office 2007 operating systems p4080 podcast commentary power architecture rant research reverse debugging reverse execution S4D SiCS Multicore days Simics simulation software tools Sun SystemC video virtualization Vista Windows

1

  • F-Secure Blog

Blogs and news

  • Andras Vajda's blog (on multicore)
  • Embedded in Academia (John Regehr)
  • Grant Martin
  • Jack Ganssle
  • My Wind River Blog
  • Security Now podcast
  • Secworks (Joachim Strömbergson)
  • Simon Kågström
  • Synopsys View from the Top
  • Worse Than Failure

Archives

  • May 2013 (2)
  • April 2013 (1)
  • March 2013 (4)
  • February 2013 (1)
  • January 2013 (3)
  • December 2012 (2)
  • November 2012 (2)
  • October 2012 (1)
  • September 2012 (6)
  • August 2012 (4)
  • July 2012 (4)
  • June 2012 (3)
  • May 2012 (4)
  • April 2012 (2)
  • March 2012 (3)
  • February 2012 (1)
  • January 2012 (6)
  • December 2011 (2)
  • November 2011 (3)
  • October 2011 (4)
  • September 2011 (5)
  • August 2011 (4)
  • July 2011 (3)
  • June 2011 (4)
  • May 2011 (7)
  • April 2011 (1)
  • March 2011 (3)
  • February 2011 (5)
  • January 2011 (1)
  • December 2010 (4)
  • November 2010 (3)
  • October 2010 (5)
  • September 2010 (5)
  • August 2010 (5)
  • July 2010 (6)
  • June 2010 (5)
  • May 2010 (3)
  • April 2010 (4)
  • March 2010 (3)
  • February 2010 (4)
  • January 2010 (7)
  • December 2009 (6)
  • November 2009 (6)
  • October 2009 (7)
  • September 2009 (6)
  • August 2009 (7)
  • July 2009 (11)
  • June 2009 (5)
  • May 2009 (10)
  • April 2009 (7)
  • March 2009 (8)
  • February 2009 (9)
  • January 2009 (12)
  • December 2008 (8)
  • November 2008 (9)
  • October 2008 (9)
  • September 2008 (10)
  • August 2008 (13)
  • July 2008 (12)
  • June 2008 (8)
  • May 2008 (9)
  • April 2008 (10)
  • March 2008 (7)
  • February 2008 (8)
  • January 2008 (5)
  • December 2007 (5)
  • November 2007 (7)
  • October 2007 (7)
  • September 2007 (12)
  • August 2007 (9)
  • July 2007 (2)
© Copyright 2013 - Observations from Uppsala
Infinity Theme by DesignCoral / WordPress