uncategorized – Observations from Uppsala

Additional Notes on Spotify

After about a month of using Spotify, it is time for an update. I got several people asking about how I was doing with Spotify, based on my previous blog post about the service. The results so far have honestly surprised me – it has become my default way of listening to music, despite all of my previous criticisms being pretty much validated. I guess the “access any song” is really a compelling value proposition, strong enough to overcome the limited organizational tools.

I Finally Gave up and Tried Spotify

I am probably among the last people to have tried Spotify. When the service first arrived ten years ago I looked at it and concluded it seemed a poor match for my needs. To me, music is something you buy and own permanently in the style of old-fashioned CDs. The whole idea of a streaming service where an artist, album, or song could go missing all of sudden due to factors beyond your control just seemed (and still seems) suspicious. Everybody else seemed to love it, but that does not necessarily mean it is good… However, I finally did jump in and try Spotify, and here is what I found.

Cancer Part 2: Going Radioactive

As I chronicled earlier this year (see “A Sudden Case of Cancer”), I got a Thyroid Cancer diagnosis back in May of this year. In June I went through surgery which went very well. After only three weeks, I was sufficiently recovered to travel to Greece and give a keynote presentation at the SAMOS conference. My scar prevented me from taking as much as advantage as I could have of the sun and pool, but it was possible to do at least a little bit of bathing towards the end. Now, I have reached part two of the treatment, radioiodine therapy to knock out any lingering cancer cells. Basically, I am going radioactive for a few days.

Off-Topic: Windows Explorer Tip: Shift Right-Click

For some reason, Microsoft has decided to hide some decidedly useful features in Windows 10 explorer behind the non-intuitive and rather unknown “shift-key + right-click” combination.

When is Redundancy Cheaper?

fire from MS Office clip art I find the subject of fault tolerance and resiliency in computers quite interesting. It also very interesting to look into what kinds of faults actually do happen in the real world, and what impact they have. I recently found a couple of good sources on this. First of all, a paper from Super Computing 2012 by Fiala et al, called “Detection and Correction of Silent Data Corruption for Large-Scale High-Performance Computing” (ACM Digital Library). One of its references was to a 2011 talk by Al Geist, “What is the Monster in the Closet”, which provided some more data on how common faults are.

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Chapter one of “Software and System Development Using Virtual Platforms”

Softwre-and-system-development-using-virtual-platforms-210x258 The first chapter of mine and Daniel Aarno’s book Software and System Development Using Virtual Platforms can be downloaded from the Wind River Blog or the Elsevier Scitechconnect blog.

The purpose of the free chapter is to provide a way to understand the style of the book – and hopefully lead people on to buy the whole thing to read it.

The paperback edition looks really nice, and the printed copies that I have had the honor to get have been very well made.

Off-Topic: Lalandia Billund (Vacation)

Another Summer vacation has come around, and as usual that causes a blog post or two on Summer tips and comments on places where I have been. This year, we went down to Denmark to visit the city of Billund, home to Legoland and Lalandia. Lalandia is an interesting mix of indoors activity center and camping village. We rented a house there for our vacation, and are overall very pleased with the place.

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Third Swedish Workshop on Multicore: Call for Papers

The call for papers for the third annual Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing (MCC10) is now out! MCC is a nice venue for multicore research about everything from computer design to software and debug. It is fairly informal, but still attracts some good papers and provides good discussions. It is not restricted to Swedish submissions, in 2009 there were several international participants. I gave a keynote talk about multicore and Simics at last year’s MCC, and for this year, I am on the program committee and looking forward to many great submissions to review!

Eclipse Linux Kernel Indexing Works

Edited on 2009-Feb-01, to include the link to the illustrated guide that really helps you get there faster. Thanks Simon! Also, promoted to front page, original post was put up on 2008-Nov-09.

Thanks to Simon Kågströms post (and the even better second-generation with screenshots) about using Eclipse for the Linux kernel, I have a much nicer work environment now for my ongoing work in learning Linux device drivers on PowerPC, which has helped me work my way through several hard-to-figure-out system calls. Continue reading “Eclipse Linux Kernel Indexing Works”

Building a Wooden Deck and Computer Simulation

I just spent the first week of Summer vacation practising the Swedish national sport of home renovation. It seems that everyone is doing that all the time nowadays – it might be that I have reached the age of family raising where that becomes important, or it might be that it is a general trend that more people spend more time and money renovating their homes. I think it is the second case.

Anyhow, what we set out to do this year was to replace (most of) the twenty-year-old wooden decking on the backside of our small row house with a new one. This was quite an adventure, as we discovered all kinds of interesting designs and problems with the old decking structure. Problems, which do reflect on the realities of computer programming and simulation.

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Linux KVM for IBM Mainframes

There was an interesting little note at the CodeMonkey blog… basically, the Linux kvm kernel hardware virtualization support system now works on IBM z series mainframes. Using the z architecture virtualization support in hardware. Nice to see some attention being put on non-x86 architectures. And a nice historical note that current x86 virtualization extensions were indeed inspired by the s/370 architecture from the mid-1970s. Cool.

ESC Silicon Valley 2008: Class 410

I am scheduled to talk at the ESC SV 2008 in the technical program. In 2006 and 2007 my topic was Multicore Debugging, but this year I have changed to Using Simulation Tools for Embedded Software Development. The date is April 17, the time 8.30 to 10.00, and the place the San Jose Convention Center.

See you there!

SCDsource: Reality Check on Virtual Prototypes

Bill Murray of the “New Media Outlet” SCDsource has published one of the best articles that I have seen on the use of software simulators and virtual prototypes in industry. The examples in the article run from low-level code run on very accurate simulators all the way to very fast virtual systems that are used instead of actual hardware to train NASA operators. The article covers the end-user perspective and is not particularly oriented towards a particular vendor. It offers some nice insights into the expected and unexpected benefits that various companies have obtained from using simulators of various kinds. As well as some glimpses into the underlying technologies they have chosen, developed, and adapted.

Highly recommended.

Virtualization and Linux on a DSP Processor

A small tidbit that I found interesting due to the targeted platform. LinuxDevices reports that the VirtualLogix VLX-NI virtualization layer that used to run only on x86 platforms now also run on TI DSPs in the C64+ series. Basically, you put their virtualization layer on the DSP, and you can then on the same core run both a Linux kernel and a DSP/BIOS kernel. Thus supporting traditional DSP development and Linux-style development on the same core.

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ARM Cortex-A9, Trango, and Virtualization for Migration

The new version of Trango’s embedded “secure virtualizer” for the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore is an interesting solution in that it directly applies virtualization technology to the issue of migrating solutions (complete software stacks) from single-core to multicore. The details are a bit sketchy in just how this is done, there is some hardware support in recent ARM architectures, but a little bit of adaptation of a guest OS using paravirtual techniques are likely not a blocker. It also touches on security, implemented using ARM’s trustzone technology. All in all, I think this is a typical example of something that we are going to see much more of.