There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you can use Simics to enable the automatic testing of pretty much any computer system (as long as we can put it inside a simulator). This is a natural follow-up to the earlier post about continuous integration with Simics and Simics-Simulink integrations — automated test runs is a mandatory and necessary part of all modern software development.
Category: Wind River Blog
Wind River Blog: Simics-Simulink PIL Integration
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how we have made Simics work with the Simulink Processor-in-the-Loop (PIL). This was a pretty interesting project, with a lot going on behind the scenes to realize what looks deceptively simple on the surface. Read the Wind River blog post for the details!
Wind River Blog: Continuous Integration, in two versions
At the Wind River corporate blog, there is a blog post that I wrote about continuous integration and Simics. At the Elsevier Computer Science Connect blog, there is also a blog post about continuous integration and Simics that I wrote. These two texts are essentially the same, and I had the good fortune to get it posted in multiple places. The reason it is up at Elsevier is to help promote our soon-to-be-released book at about virtual platforms and simulation (and a little bit about Simics), and hopefully we will reach a larger audience with both messages: CI with Simics is a great idea, and the book is a great book to buy.
Wind River Blog: A Million Simics Runs (and lots of cool technology)
During my vacation, a blog post went up on the Wind River blog with an interview with Hyungmin Cho, a researcher at Stanford. Hyungmin has done some seriously heavy and cool work with Simics, using it together with a circuit-level simulator to investigate error resiliency in hardware devices, and how errors propagate from hardware into the software. As part of this process, he has setup an automated test system using Simics, and this system has done more than a million automated Simics runs. That is an insane number – I have been using Simics for twelve years now, and if I had used it every day for all these years, I would have had to start 10 runs per hour, every hour of the day. It shows the power of automation along with parallel runs on clusters of machines – once the setup is automated, you can pour on the volume.
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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: Simics Networking (with Video Demo)
On the Wind River blog network, I have a short posting about network simulation with Simics. It points to the network demo video that we put up on Youtube a few weeks ago, along with some explanations of what is shown in the video. In short, we show a simple example of a network being simulated in Simics, along with some examples of what you can do with it.
Wind River Blog: Cyberphysical System Modeling with Simics
As an old embedded systems and real-time guy, I have always worked with computer systems that are in some way tied to their environment. Simics has often been used to model such computer systems, inside of customer organizations. Which makes it a bit hard to show… however, recently I have cooked up a demo showing Simics simulating a computer system alongside a physical system.
I just put out a post on the Wind River blog, pointing to both a video of my own “water heater” demo and some other Youtube videos showing Simics integrated with simulations of the real world. A screenshot of my setup in action is shown on the side of this post.
Wind River Blog: Simics Modeling Video Demo
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, featuring a recently-posted video demo of device and systems modeling with Simics. In this video demo, we show an outline of the modeling flow used with Simics 4.8, using only the Eclipse interface. It is actually quite new that we can do this much modeling from within Eclipse; recent efforts in improving the Simics user experience are starting to pay off. As part of the product design team, it feels good to see how even quite small features can really improve the usability of the product.
It is also my first blog post on the recently renovated Wind River blog network. I like the new look of the corporate blog, even if I will have to go back and adjust some older blog images to account for the change from a dark to a light background.
Wind River Blog: UEFI on Simics
Simics can run and debug UEFI BIOSes, and that is the topic of my latest blog at Wind River. UEFI is actually pretty interesting once you get to know it, and building a good debug experience for UEFI took a bit of work. Still, it was built as just another target for the standard uniform Simics debugger, which is not the way most other UEFI and BIOS debuggers are built. I guess in that in the past, debugging a BIOS required such specialized tools that it made sense to also build a custom specialized frontend for the purpose. With a simulator as the backend, things do become simpler and more uniform, and Eclipse CDT is a actually a very good basis for a debugger for any kind of C and C++ code.
For more reading on UEFI itself, I can recommend the 2011 Intel Tech Journal on the topic.
Wind River Blog: Reverse Execution (not Debugging)
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, where I go back to the basics of reverse execution in Simics and what it can do. The post is not about reverse debugging, about which I have written quite a bit (see for example my series of blog posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), but about the core of reverse execution. I.e., moving the system state back in time in a variety of ways. There is an accompanying video demo on Youtube.
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: System Editor Demo for Simics
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, with a video demo of the new Simics 4.8 System Editor function. Posts are coming out quite quickly now, with various aspects of Simics and in particular Simics 4.8 being highlighted. This particular feature is probably the biggest news in Simics 4.8 from a user interface perspective, as it allows you to (finally) inspect a target setup in a nice graphical tree view.
Wind River Blog: Collaborating with Recording Checkpoints
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how some new features in Simics 4.8 improve the collaboration power of Simics checkpoints. For the first time, Simics checkpoint can now carry a piece of history (slice of time), which also makes reverse execution and reverse debug work with checkpoints in a logical way.
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Wind River Blog: Simics 4.8 is Here
Simics 4.8 is finally released, and I put up a blog post explaining the most important news in this release. It is two years since we released Simics 4.6, so there is quite a bit of news in Simics 4.8 – even though lots of functionality has been released continuously into 4.6 over the past twenty four months. My personal favorite are the comments you can put on an execution and the stop log, but then again, that might be because they have been a couple of pet ideas of mine so I am hardly an impartial judge. Everything else is also really good, and the engineering teams and marketing teams involved have put in a lot of effort into this release (as we do in all releases).