The 2022 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference was back in physical form at its usual venue at the Holiday Inn München. It was a great conference, and just like at the 2022 DAC people were very happy to be back in person.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2022. Verification, System Simulation, and People!”Category: virtual machines
Intel Blog: Catching a Tricky Bug by Running Simics on Simics
I recently published a long post on the Intel Community Blog, talking about how my colleague Evgeny solved a nicely complicated bug using Simics-on-Simics. The bug involved UEFI, an operating system, SMM, SMI, and virtualization. Just another day in the office (or more like a year, given how long it took to get this one resolved).
DAC 2019 – Cloud, a Book, an Award, and More
Last week was spent at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Las Vegas. I had a presentation and poster in the Designer/IP track about Clouds, Containers, and Virtual Platforms , and worked in the Intel Simulation Solutions booth at the show floor. The DAC was good as always, meeting many old friends in the industry as well as checking out the latest trends in EDA (hint: same trends as everywhere else). One particularly nice surprise was a book (the printed type, not the Vegas “book” that means something else entirely).
Continue reading “DAC 2019 – Cloud, a Book, an Award, and More”Intel Blog Post: Simics in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge
The US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) ran a “Cyber Grand Challenge” in 2016, where automated cyber-attack and cyber-defense systems were pitted against each other to drive progress in autonomous cyber-security. The competition was run on physical computers (obviously), but Simics was used in a parallel flow to check that competitors’ programs were not trying to undermine the infrastructure of the competition rather than compete fairly inside the rules of the competition.
Intel Blog Posts: Running Simics in Containers
Running Simics inside a container is a topic that has come up several times in recent years. In a two-part Intel Developer Zone blog post, my colleague Mambwe Mumbwa and I discuss both some background on container technology, how and how well Simics can run inside of containers, and what you can with containerized Simicses. Overall, containers offer a very good alternative to virtual machines for running programs like Simics, and the tool ecosystem opens up some exciting new ways to manage Simics installations and simulation instances.
Update: this post was extended to link to both part 1 and part 2 of the blog.
Continue reading “Intel Blog Posts: Running Simics in Containers”Intel Blog: Why Target Variation Matters (finding a Xen bug)
Simics and other simulation solutions are a great way to add more variation to your software testing. I have just documented a nice case of this on my blog at the Intel Developer Zone (IDZ), where the Simics team found a bug in how Xen deals with MPX instructions when using VT-x. Thanks to running on Simics, where scenarios not available in current hardware are easy to set up.
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Reverse Debug with Hardware in the Loop
Last year (2015), a paper called “Don’t Panic: Reverse Debugging of Kernel Drivers” was presented at the ESEC/FSE (European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering) conference. The paper was written by Pavel Dovgalyuk, Denis Dmitriev, and Vladimir Makarov from the Russian Academy of Sciences. It describes a rather interesting approach to Linux kernel device driver debug, using a deterministic variant of Qemu along with record/replay of hardware interactions. I think this is the first published instance of using reverse debugging in a simulator together with real hardware.
First post on the Intel Software and Services Blog
I have posted my first blog post to the Intel Software and Services blog channel. The Intel Software and Services blog is one channel in the Intel corporate blog you find at https://blogs.intel.com/. Other bloggers on the Software and Services channel write about security, UEFI, cloud, graphics, open source software, and other topics. Intel has a large software development community, and we produce quite a bit of software – and we do write about the innovations that come out of Intel that rely on software.
On my part, I will be posting more materials on simulation at Intel, as part of my role as a simulation evangelist on the Software and Service blog channel.
Article on Cloud-Based Virtual Labs and Why you Want Them
There are still some articles being published that I wrote while at Wind River. The latest is a piece on just what you could do with a lab in cloud – in particular, a lab based on virtual platforms like Simics. Eva Skoglund at Wind River and I wrote this together, and it is a nice high-level summary of why you really need to have a virtual cloud-based lab if you are doing embedded systems development. It is published in the online European magazine Electropages.
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Speaking at the Embedded Conference Scandinavia
On November 3, 2015, I will give a presentation at the Embedded Conference Scandinavia about simulating IoT systems. The conference program can be found at http://www.svenskelektronik.se/ECS/ECS15/Program.html, with my session detailed at http://www.svenskelektronik.se/ECS/ECS15/Program/IoT%20Development.html.
My topic is how to realistically simulate very large IoT networks for software testing and system development. This is a fun field where I have spent significant time recently. Only a couple of weeks ago, I tried my hand simulating a 1000-node network. Which worked! I had 1000 ARM-based nodes running VxWorks running at the same time, inside a single Simics process, and at speeds close to real time! It did use some 55GB of RAM, which I think is a personal record for largest use of system resources from a single process. Still, it only took a dozen processors to do it.
Breaking and Detecting Simulators and Emulators
I have read a few news items and blog posts recently about how various types of software running on top of virtual machines and emulators have managed to either break the emulators or at least detect their presence and self-destruct. This is a fascinating topic, as it touches on the deep principles of computing: just because a piece of software can be Turing-equivalent to a piece of hardware does not mean that software that goes looking for the differences won’t find any or won’t be able to behave differently on a simulator and on the real thing.
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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.
Intel Technology Journal on Simics
The September 2013 issue of the Intel Technology Journal (which actually arrived in December) is all about Simics. Daniel Aarno of Intel and I served as the content architects for the issue, which meant that we managed to contributed articles from various sources, and wrote an introductory article about Simics and its usage in general. It has taken a while to get this journal issue out, and now that it is done it feels just great! I am very happy about the quality of all the ten contributed articles, and reading the final versions of them actually taught me some new things you could do with Simics! I already wrote about the issue in a Wind River blog post, so in this my personal blog I want to be a little bit more, well, personal.
Wind River Blog: Starting & Configuring Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how Simics sessions are started and the mechanics of system setups in Simics. It also has a link to a Youtube video demonstrating various ways of starting Simics simulation sessions.
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Wind River Blog: Simics and Flying Piggies
I just added a new blog post at the Wind River blog, about determinism and illustrating Simics-style determinism is by looking at the game Bad Piggies. Games and simulators have quite a lot in common, actually.
Continue reading “Wind River Blog: Simics and Flying Piggies”