One thing that surprises me is how rare the feature of checkpointing or snapshotting is in the land of virtual platforms, despite the obvious benefits of that feature. Indeed, checkpointing was one of the first cool things demonstrated to me when I joined Virtutech back in 2002. Today, I could not ever imagine doing without it. Not having checkpointing is like having a word processor where you only get to save once, when your document is finished, with no option of saving intermediate states.
But not everyone seems to consider this an important feature, judging from its relative rarity in the world of EDA and virtual platforms. Why is this? Let’s look at some possible explanations.
Continue reading “Checkpointing: Meaningless, Difficult, or just Overlooked?”