Fault Injection is a topic that has fascinated me for a long time. Not just the area of software-to-software fault injection, but more so how you inject faults into hardware using hardware (and how to conveniently approximate this using a simulator). I just stumbled on a short interesting note about such hardware-actuated fault injection in a Fujitsu article.
Author: Jakob
Debug, Design, and Microsoft Data
It used to be that Microsoft was the big, boring, evil company that nobody felt was very inspiring. Today, with competition from Google and Apple as well as a strong internal research department, Microsoft feels very different. There are really interesting and innovative ideas and paper coming out of Microsoft today. It seems that their investments in research and software engineering are generating very sophisticated software tools (and good software products).
I have recently seen a number of examples of what Microsoft does with the user feedback data they collect from their massive installed base. I am not talking about Google-style personal information collection, but rather anonymous collection of user interface and error data in a way that is more designed to built better products than targeting ads.
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.
DV* 30 Years
On the very binary date of 11-11-11, my alma mater, the computer science (DV, for datavetenskap) education at Uppsala University celebrated its thirty years’ anniversary. It was a great classic student party in the evening with a nice mix of old alumni and fresh-faced students. Lots of singing and some nice skits on stage. Great fun, and my voice has still not recovered. It also got me thinking about it is that we really do as computer scientists.
Jan Bosch: Software Provocateur
Last week, I had the honor of presenting at and attending the talks of the Lindholmen Software Development Day. The first keynote speaker was Professor Jan Bosch from Chalmers, who did his best to provoke, prod, and shock the audience into action to change how they do software. While I might not agree with everything he said, overall it was very enjoyable and insightful talk.
Wind River Blog: Why Simics will not run Super Mario
On my Wind River blog, I just posted a fairly long post about simulation abstraction levels. It was inspired by a cool article in ArsTechnica about Nintendo emulators, and the costs and benefits of being ever more faithful to the hardware.
GPGPU for Instruction-Set Simulation – Maybe, Maybe not
I just read a quite interesting article by Christian Pinto et al, “GPGPU-Accelerated Parallel and Fast Simulation of Thousand-core Platforms“, published at the CCGRID 2011 conference. It discusses some work in using a GPGPU to run simulations of massively parallel computers, using the parallelism of the GPU to speed the simulation. Intriguing concept, but the execution is not without its flaws and it is unclear at least from the paper just how well this generalizes, scales, or compares to parallel simulation on a general-purpose multicore machine.
Continue reading “GPGPU for Instruction-Set Simulation – Maybe, Maybe not”
The Adversarial Approach to Compilation
Paul Henning-Kamp has written a series of columns for the ACM Queue and Communications of the ACM. He is pointed, always controversial, and often quite funny. One recent column was called “The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake“, which discusses the bad design decision of using null-terminated strings (with the associated buffer overrun risks that would have been easily avoided with a length+data-style string format). Well worth a read. A key part of the article is the dual observation that compilers are starting to try to solve the efficiency problems of null-terminated strings – and that such heavily optimizing compilers quite often very hard to use.
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.
Nvidia “Kal-El” Variable SMP
Nvidia recently announced that their already-known “Kal-El” quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC actually contains five processor cores, not just four as a “normal” quad-core would. They call the architecture “Variable SMP”, and it is a pretty smart design. The one where you think, “I should have thought of that”, which is the best sign of something truly good.
Wind River Blog: Stop, Think, and Tie Your Shoes Right
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, which could seem to be about shoes but which is really about process improvement. In particular, the need for companies to let their employees take a step or two back and look at what they are doing and what they could do better.
It is way too common to be so busy running around being inefficient that there is no time to think about how to become more efficient. Change also requires some discipline to actually keep pushing at habits until they change for the better.
My Bug Doesn’t Work!
Every once in a while I need to build demo setups to show debugging in action. As I have blogged before, finding a good bug when you need one isn’t always easy. The solution is to try to invent artificial bugs, and I was very happy when I managed to stage a buffer overrun in a VxWorks program.
It is pretty very nice demo in which you first start a period program A, which prints the value of an incrementing counter every target second. You then run a supposedly unrelated program B, resulting in the values that program A prints to become corrupted. Perfect to show off reverse execution and data breakpoints in reverse as you go from the point where the corrupted value is printed to the piece of code that overwrote the variable.
But then I ported the demo to a new platform… and the bug didn’t work anymore. My bug had caught a bug and was now not working, or at least not they way I expected it to. What had happened?
Continue reading “My Bug Doesn’t Work!”
Wind River Blog: Surfing the Web with Netscape 4
Just for fun, I tried to surf the web of today using a Netscape 4 browser from 2001.
The result: not exactly useful. Netscape 4 was bad back then, and it does not work at all with the current style of web coding.
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.
IBM i – I’m Impressed
From what little I had heard and read, the IBM AS/400 (later known as iSeries, and now known as simply IBM i) sounded like a fascinating system. I knew that it had a rich OS stack that contained most of the services a program needs, and a JVM-style byte code format for applications that let it change from custom processors to Power Architecture without impacting users at all. It was supposedly business-critical and IBM-quality rock solid. But that was about it.
So when Software Engineering Radio episode 177 interviewed the i chief architect Steve Will, I was hooked. It turned out that IBM i was cooler than I imagined. Here are my notes on why I think that IBM i is one of the most interesting systems out there in real use.