Wind River Blog – Observations from Uppsala

Jerry Fiddler on the Early Days of Wind River and Building a Product

Wind River is celebrating their 40^th anniversary as a company with a series of historical look-backs posted on the Wind River channel on YouTube. One of the videos is an interview with Jerry Fiddler who founded Wind River back in 1981, by Wind River current CEO Kevin Dallas. Jerry Fiddler talks about how he got started in computers, and especially about how Wind River got started and grew. It is both a fantastic set of historical anecdotes and some solid product management and strategy insights.

Intel Blog: Wind River Using Simics to Test IoT at Scale

intel sw small This really happened last week, but I was in the US for the DAC then. I did another blog on Intel Software blog, about a white paper that Wind River put out about how they use Simics internally. The white paper is a really good set of examples of how Simics can be used for software development, test, and debug – regardless of how old or new the hardware is. It also touches my favorite topic of IoT simulation and scaling up – Wind River is actually using Simics for 1000+ node tests of IoT software! Read on at https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2016/06/06/wind-river-uses-simics-test-massive-iot-networks/

Wind River Guest Blog: Interview with Sangeeta, a CoFluent user doing Software Modeling

Cofluent studio Even though I am now working for Intel, the nice folks at Wind River have let me do blogging on the Wind River blog as a guest anyway. I first blogged about the fantastic world of simulators that I have found inside Intel, and now a longer technical piece has appeared on a use of Intel CoFluent Studio. I interviewed Sangeeta Ghangam at Intel, who used CoFluent Studio to model the behavior of a complex software load on a gateway, connected to a set of sensor nodes. It is rather different from the very concrete software execution I work on with Simics. Being able to model and estimate the performance and cost and size of systems before you go to the concrete implementation is an important part of software and systems architecture, and CoFluent offers a neat tool for that.

Read the full story on the Wind River blog!

Wind River Blog: Interview with Intel Users of Simics

Intel is a big Simics user, but most of the time Intel internal use of Simics is kept internal. However, we recently had the chance to interview Karthik Kumar and Thomas Willhalm of Intel about how they used Simics to interact with external companies and improve Intel hardware designs. The interview is found on the Wind River blog network.

It is also my last blog post written at Wind River; since January 18, I am working at Intel. I am working on ways to keep publishing texts about Simics and simulation, but the details are not yet clear.

Wind River Blog: Demo of the Lab Cloud Web API with Video

I just posted a short blog post on the Wind River blog, introducing a video demo of the Web API to Wind River Helix Lab Cloud. In the post and video, I show how the Lab Cloud Web API works. For someone familiar with REST-style APIs, this is probably baby-level, but for me and probably most of our user base, it is something new and a rather interesting style for an API. Thus, doing a video that shows the first few steps of authentication and getting things going seems like a good idea.

Wind River Blog: Using Lab Cloud to Communicate Hardware Setups to Software Developers

In a blog post at Wind River, I describe how the Wind River Helix Lab Cloud system can be used to communicate hardware design to software developers. The idea is that you upload a virtual platform to the cloud-based system, and then share it to the software developers. In this way, there is no need to install or build a virtual platform locally, and the sender has perfect control over access and updates. It is a realization of the hardware communication principles I presented in an earlier blog post on use cases for Lab Cloud.

But the past part is that the targets I talk about in the blog post and use in the video are available for anyone! Just register on Lab Cloud, and you can try your own threaded software and check how it scales on a simulated 8-core ARM!

Wind River Blog: Resolving Software Issues using Lab Cloud

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how I helped a colleague resolve a real problem using the preview version of the new Helix Lab Cloud system. The Lab Cloud right now is basically Simics behind a simplified web user interface, exposing the checkpointing and record-replay facilities in a very clear way. You can also share your sessions for live interactions with other people, which is truly cool.

Wind River Blog: Fault Injection using Simics – with Video

I just added a new blog post on the Wind River blog, about how you do fault injection with Simics. This blog post covers the new fault injection framework we added in Simics 5, and the interesting things you can do when you add record and replay capabilities to spontaneous interactive work with Simics. There is also a Youtube demo video of the system in action.

Wind River Blog: Simics 5 is Out!

On June 30, Wind River (my job) released Simics 5, the latest version of Simics. I have been working with Simics since 2002 now, and the tool is still improving, adding new features, and adopting the current world. The announcement blog post provides an overview of the features of the new release, and we will be doing some additional in-depth posts later on.

Wind River Blog: Simics 5 Multicore Accelerator Explained

While I was on vacation, Wind River published a blog post I wrote about the new multicore accelerator feature of Simics 5. The post has some details on what we did, and some of the things we learnt about simulation performance.

Wind River Blog: Automating Targets with the Simics Agent

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the Simics Agent feature that we included in Simics last year. Took a while to get a blog out, as I had so many other things to write about. It was also nice to get a video demo out to accompany the post. The most interesting part about the Simics Agent to me is how much more convenient it is to script a target with an agent on the inside. Too bad that also changes the target software stack a bit — but I do think that that is OK most of the time. As always, the solution has to be designed with the end goal in mind, and there is no absolute right or wrong here. Read the blog post for more details!

Wind River Blog: The Trinity of Simulation

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the Trinity of Simulation – the computer, the system, and the world. It discusses how you build a really complete system model using not just a virtual platform like Simics, but you also integrate it with a model of the system the computer sits in, as well as the world around it. Like this:

2015-02-06_19-27-21

Read more about it in the blog post, and all the older blog posts it links to!

Wind River Blog: An Interview with Andreas Buchwieser about Safety Standards and Simics

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, an interview with Andreas Buchwieser from the Wind River office in München. It discusses how Simics can be applied to the field of safety-critical systems, including helping test the software to get it certified. Really interesting, and in particular it is worth noting that qualifying tools in the IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 context is much easier than in DO-178B/C. The industrial family of safety standards have been created to allow for tools to help validate an application without forcing incredibly high demands on the development of those tools.

Wind River Blog: Internet-of-Things Massive Simulation using Simics

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how Simics is used to simulate large wireless networks for IoT (Internet-of-Things) applications.

It is funny for me to be back at the IoT game. A decade ago (time flies, doesn’t it?), at Virtutech, I and Johan Runeson took part in an EU research project on exactly this topic. Unfortunately, we had to back out of that project due to economic circumstances and failing management commitment, but we still learnt a few things that were relevant now that we are back in the IoT game. In particular, how to simulate wireless networks in a reasonable way in a transaction-level simulator. Thus, payback for the investment took 10 years to arrive, but it did arrive. To me, that underscores the need to be a bit speculative, take some risk, and try to explore the future.