I have recently got back to developing training labs for the Simics simulator (and related technologies). During the process of developing a new accelerator model using as many of the latest frameworks and APIs as possible, it was basically guaranteed that I would hit some bugs and unexpected behaviors. That is a natural part of and benefit from creating training materials in the first place. It also provides a good illustration of two fundamentally different ways to look at software development. One is to play it safe and get things done in known ways, and the other is charge ahead, try the unknown, and see what happens. Damn the torpedoes, bugs are a benefit. No bug reports, no glory. In this post, I will share some recent examples of just coding ahead and breaking thing.
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About Virtual Events
Just like most people who can, I have been working from home since March 2020 due to Covid-19. Now that we are hopefully seeing the end of the pandemic in the west, it is worth looking back at the conference-from-home aspect of work-from-home. I have seen our Simics training, the Design Automation Conference (DAC), the Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) Europe, commercial training events, talks at industry conferences, guest lectures, and multiple internal Intel events go virtual. It has been interesting to see how this has worked out, and it seems to me that we are starting to see some good recurring patterns. People have adapted and figured out how to use video meeting technology better and better.
Continue reading “About Virtual Events”Intel Blog: How Teaching Users Drives Product Improvements in Simics
I have a post out on the Intel Software blog about my experience developing and delivering training for Simics over the past few years. A key observation is that building training is a great way to test the product, and drives changes and improvements in the product. The blog is found at https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/teaching-users-drives-product-improvements-in-simics-sw.html
Continue reading “Intel Blog: How Teaching Users Drives Product Improvements in Simics”Adjusting to Work-from-Home: Remote Live Simics Training
In the current world-wide lockdown due to Covid-19, many things that were done in-person in the past have to become virtual. The Simics® New User Training that we run at Intel and with our customers and partners is no different. In normal times, we run in-person classes around the world, but that is not an option right now. Thus, we shifted to running remote live classes as a substitute for the time being. This blog shares some of my experience from running remote live classes.
Intel Blog Post: Using Wind River® Simics® to Inspire Teachers and Researchers in Costa Rica
A while ago, I visited my Intel colleagues in Costa Rica and ran a workshop for university teachers and researchers, showing how Simics could be used in academia. I worked with a very smart and talented intern, Jose Fernando Molina, and after a rather long process I have published an interview with him on my Intel blog: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2017/12/05/windriver-simics-to-inspire-teachers-costarica
Assembly Programming as Game: “Human Resource Machine”
Human Resource Machine, from the Tomorrow Corporation, is a puzzle game that basically boils down to assembly-language programming. It has a very charming graphical style and plenty of entertaining sideshows, hiding the rather dry core game in a way that really works! It is really great fun and challenging – even for myself who has a reasonable amount of experience coding at this low level. It feels a bit like coding in the 1980s, except that all instructions take the same amount of time in the game.
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Busy Writing a Book About Simics
For the past six months I have not been doing much blogging at all, neither here nor on the Wind River blog. The reason is that I have been directing my writing energy into writing a text book about Simics together with Daniel Aarno at Intel. Last year, Daniel and I worked on an Intel Technology Journal issue on Simics. The ITJ issue was kind of a first step on the way to the book, collecting several articles about Simics usage at Intel and elsewhere. The book itself will be much more of a detailed description of Simics and how it works and why it works the way it works.
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.
Kindergarten Robot 3: Programming is Kid’s Play
Today I finally got to try my MEPROM-equipped Lego Mindstorms robot with a larger group of kids. As expected, this did not go quite as expected.
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Kindergarten Robot 2: Going Programmable
As discussed in my previous blog post about Kindergarten robots, I wanted to see if I can teach kids the core idea of programming. This project has now progressed to the point that I have a working prototype of a programmable robot.
Essentially, the robot is programmed by putting colored Lego bricks in a sequence on top of the robot. This should be accessible and direct enough to work with kids — and with no computer needed, just direct physical interaction with the system. For some reason, I think the extra level of abstraction from a screen to a robot is just an unnecessary obstacle at this level.
Kindergarten Robot
One of my little projects while on parental leave has been to play around with my Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 robotics kit. Apart from being fun for a serious dad like myself, I always had in mind how I could use it with kids to get them interested in technology.
When I was a PhD student in Uppsala back around 2000, we bought a pile of the Lego Mindstorms RCX kits, for use in real-time courses. Obviously, the students loved the opportunity to play with Lego (including the few females). What was less obvious and much more interesting was what happened when we brought in a bunch of children from a local kindergarten to visit — they really took a liking to our little yellow robots running around a classroom. They treated the robots as little animals, wondering what they were doing and why…
With that in mind, I decided to try to reprise this myself with my own son and his kindergarten friends. 
Last week, I took my robot kit with me and went to meet the kids.
Getting the Least of our your C Compiler – The Best Article I have ever written?
Back in 2001, while a PhD student at Uppsala University and IAR Systems, I wrote what has to be the most popular and long-lived article I ever did: “Getting the Least out of Your C Compiler“. It was an Embedded Systems Conference class that I also presented in 2002 (after that, I changed jobs to Virtutech and therefore C programming was no longer my official topic). However, the text has lived on. It was featured as a chapter in the “Firmware Handbook” edited by Jack Ganssle, translated into German by IAR Germany, and has popped up in various places from time to time.
Last week, it resurfaced at Embedded.com, with an attribution that was initially wrong.
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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.
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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.
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