Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
Integration is hard, that is well-known. For computer chip and system-on-chip design, integration has to be done pre-silicon in order to find integration issues early so that designs can be updated without expensive silicon re-spins. Such integration involves a lot of pieces and many cross-connections, and in order to do integration pre-silicon, we need a virtual platform.
Continue reading “Intel Blog Post: The More the Merrier – Integration and Virtual Platforrms”
Doing continuous integration and continuous delivery for embedded systems is not necessarily all that easy. You need to get tools in place to support automatic testing, and free yourself from unneeded hardware dependencies. Based on an inspiring talk by Mike Long from Norway, I have a piece on how simulation helps with embedded CI and CD on my Software Evangelist blog on the Intel Developer Zone.
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.
Continue reading “Intel Blog: Why Target Variation Matters (finding a Xen bug)”
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.
I am going to present a paper about our new SystemC Library in Simics, at the DVCon Europe conference taking place in München next month. The paper is titled “Integrating Different Types of Models into a Complete Virtual System – The Simics SystemC* Library”, and I authored it together with my Intel colleagues Andreas Hedström, Xiuliang Wang, and Håkan Zeffer.
Continue reading “Presenting about Simics and SystemC at DVCon Europe 2016”
My first blog post as a software evangelist at Intel was published last week. In it, I tell the story of how our development teams used Simics to test the software behavior (UEFI, in particular) when a server is configured with several terabytes of RAM. Without having said server in physical form – just as a simulation. And running that simulation on a small host with just 256 GB of RAM. I.e., the host RAM is just a small fraction of the target. That’s the kind of things that you can do with Simics – the framework has a lot of smarts in it.
It was rather interesting to realize that just the OS page tables for this kind of system occupies gigabytes of RAM… but that just underscores just how gigantic six terabytes of memory really is.
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/
I love bug and debug stories in general. Bugs are a fun and interesting part of software engineering, programming, and systems development. Stories that involve running Simics on Simics to find bugs are a particular category that is fascinating, as it shows how to apply serious software technology to solve problems related to said serious software technology. On the Intel Software and Services blog, I just posted a story about just that: debugging a Linux kernel bug provoked by Simics, by running Simics on a small network of machines inside of Simics. See https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2016/05/30/finding-kernel-1-2-3-bug-running-wind-river-simics-simics/ for the full story.
Continue reading “Intel Blog: Finding a Linux Kernel bug by running Simics on Simics”
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.
Continue reading “Article on Cloud-Based Virtual Labs and Why you Want Them”
A new record, replay, and reverse debugger has appeared, and I just had to take a look at what they do and how they do it. “rr” has been developed by the Firefox developers at Mozilla Corporation, initially for the purpose of debugging Firefox itself. Starting at a debugger from the angle of attacking a particular program does let you get things going quickly, but the resulting tool is clearly generally useful, at least for Linux user-land programs on x86. Since I have tried to keep up with the developments in this field, a write-up seems to be called for.
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.
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.
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!
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.
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the new Wind River Helix Lab Cloud product that we launched for real last week. The Lab Cloud is a really cool way to expose Simics-style functionality, and my blog goes through some of the more prominent use cases for a simulator in the cloud. There a couple of demo videos linked from the blog, and I have also set up a Youtube playlist collecting the Simics demos and other videos that we have posted there. Quite a set over the past few years, actually!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
Read more about it in the blog post, and all the older blog posts it links to!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Continue reading “Wind River Blog: A Million Simics Runs (and lots of cool technology)”
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.
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.
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.
I have a silly demo program that I have been using for a few years to demonstrate the Simics Analyzer ability to track software programs as they are executing and plot which threads run where and when. This demo involves using that plot window to virtually draw text, in a way akin to how I used to make my old ZX Spectrum “draw” things in the border. But when I brought it up in a new setting it failed to run properly and actually starting hanging on me. Strange, but also quite funny when I realized that I had originally foreseen this very problem and consciously decided not to put in a fix for it… which now came back to bite me in a pretty spectacular way. But at least I did get an interesting bug to write about.
