Month: September 2011

EETimes Articles on Simics

I just had two articles published the Embedded Design part of the EETimes.

First, “Rethink your project planning with a virtual platform“, which talks about how virtual platforms can change your entire project planning. Essentially, by reducing project friction and risks related to hardware availability, software integration, and show-stopper bugs, you can make projects work much better.

Then we have “Transporting bugs with virtual checkpoints“, which is a shorter, popular science, version of the paper I published last year at S4D. This describes how you can use checkpointing in a virtual platform to communicate bugs across time, space, and teams.

Nvidia “Kal-El” Variable SMP

Nvidia recently announced that their already-known “Kal-El” quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC actually contains five processor cores, not just four as a “normal” quad-core would. They call the architecture “Variable SMP”, and it is a pretty smart design. The one where you think, “I should have thought of that”, which is the best sign of something truly good.

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Wind River Blog: Stop, Think, and Tie Your Shoes Right

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, which could seem to be about shoes but which is really about process improvement. In particular, the need for companies to let their employees take a step or two back and look at what they are doing and what they could do better.

It is way too common to be so busy running around being inefficient that there is no time to think about how to become more efficient. Change also requires some discipline to actually keep pushing at habits until they change for the better.

All of this can be illustrated by tying shoes.

My Bug Doesn’t Work!

Every once in a while I need to build demo setups to show debugging in action. As I have blogged before, finding a good bug when you need one isn’t always easy.  The solution is to try to invent artificial bugs, and I was very happy when I managed to stage a buffer overrun in a VxWorks program.

It is pretty very nice demo in which you first start a period program A, which prints the value of an incrementing counter every target second.  You then run a supposedly unrelated program B, resulting in the values that program A prints to become corrupted.  Perfect to show off reverse execution and data breakpoints in reverse as you go from the point where the corrupted value is printed to the piece of code that overwrote the variable.

But then I ported the demo to a new platform… and the bug didn’t work anymore. My bug had caught a bug and was now not working, or at least not they way I expected it to. What had happened?
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