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Jakob Engblom
Uppsala, Sweden
Technical Marketing Manager - Simics at Wind River
Recent Activity
Crystal Forest on Simics
Posted Mar 8, 2012 at Jakob Engblom
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Simics for Networked Systems: An Interview with Dan Poirot
Posted Nov 16, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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How to Get Virtual
Posted Aug 2, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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They Just Upgraded our Coffee Machine
Posted Jun 17, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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Simics 4.6 Initial Impressions
Posted May 31, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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Teaching Operating Systems with Simics: An Interview with Massimo Violante
Posted May 11, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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Twenty, Thirty, and Sixty Years Ago
Posted May 5, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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Kick-Starting the VxWorks 6.9 64-bit Port with Simics
Wind River just released the world's first 64-bit RTOS, Wind River VxWorks 6.9 for the 64-bit Intel x86 Architecture. This is a great achievement by the VxWorks team, and I am proud to say that Simics played a role in the development of the 64-bit port of VxWorks. Simics was used throughout the development in a variety of ways. One particular clever technique was used at the very start of the project to kick-start development and overcome the hurdle of getting hardware support in place. An operating system really consists of two main parts. There is the kernel that manages... Continue reading
Posted Mar 25, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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Integration and Testing the Integration
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently released a deep report into last year's issue with "unintended acceleration" on certain Toyota cars. They actually employed a team from NASA who analyzed the throttle control software using a wide range of cutting-edge tools. Reading their report gives a good idea for how embedded control software is developed, and the challenges inherent in validating it. The conclusion is that the software is not a likely cause of the problems. The real meat of the report (and its appendixes) is just how this conclusions is reached, and what it says about... Continue reading
Posted Mar 11, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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Working Faster with Less (Simulated) Sweat
One very important property of a virtual platform like Simics is its speed of execution. Without sufficient execution speed, a virtual platform is not very useful - users want to have results in reasonable time. Raw simulation speed (getting as many target instructions as possible simulated each second) is important, and Simics is certainly pretty good at that. It is not necessarily the case that the best way to get a job done faster is to process instructions faster. Sometimes, working smarter rather than harder is possible. Typically, working smarter means doing less to achieve the same goal. If the... Continue reading
Posted Feb 23, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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Being Helpful or simply Correct?
The other day, I spent some time getting a new operating system up on one of our Simics virtual platforms. The platform is stable, the hardware is shipping and it is being used with the very software I was setting up. However, as the operating system was booting, I got quite a lot of warnings from Simics about incorrect hardware settings. The operating system still worked, however, so why did we see all these warnings? Actually, when is it prudent to issue warnings to a user about suspicious uses of hardware? When building Simics models, we want them to be... Continue reading
Posted Feb 11, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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What I am Reading: Processor and SoC Simulation
Posted Jan 27, 2011 at Jakob Engblom
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Iterative Hardware-Software Interface Design
Making good design decisions is hard, making bad decisions is easy. The best way to avoid really bad design is to actually work through how a certain design works in practice. One of my favorite examples is how Jeff Hawkins walked around with a mockup of the original Palm Pilot to tests its real feel through daily "use". The same principle applies to software architecture. When you design a software component that other programmer's will use, the best way to make sure the design makes sense is to use it to accomplish something. Just creating an API and some unit... Continue reading
Posted Dec 22, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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Sometimes, You Have to Cheat
In a virtual platform world, cheating is sometimes a good thing. One man's cheat is another man's optimization. Let's start with a story from the 1904 olympics in St Louis. In the marathon race, a runner crossed the finish line far ahead of the competition at an incredibly good time. It quickly became clear that he had cheated - he had been riding in a car for about half the race. This was obviously wrong, and he was quickly stripped of his "victory". Running a marathon is defined as covering the distance on foot. Using a car is not an... Continue reading
Posted Dec 10, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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Debug, multicore, and more debug
I recently gave a talk at an industry-academia collaboration called ICES, Innovative Center for Embedded Systems, at KTH in Kista, Stockholm, Sweden. The theme was embedded multicore, and I realized that my role at these events seems to have changed. A few years ago, I would be the "embedded guy", defending the collective of embedded systems against speakers assuming that everything was a homogeneous shared-memory multiprocessor. This time was different, though. I have become the "debug fanatic". There seems to be less need to explain embedded multicore nowadays. The academic community and multicore event participants seem to have finally accepted... Continue reading
Posted Dec 2, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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The Giggle Effect
Last week, I went to Tel Aviv to present at the CDNLive event taking place there. CDNLive is Cadence's user meetings, and while still being mostly about hardware design and classic EDA, they added a small track about embedded software where I was presenting. The trip was quite a climate shock, going from Sweden where the puddles had just started to freeze at night to the coast of the mediterranean with 30+ degrees. The welcome was also warm, and I really appreciate the effort the local Cadence staff put into organizing the software track and the good discussions we had... Continue reading
Posted Oct 29, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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IMA on Simics: An Interview with Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux
Posted Oct 26, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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The Virtual Basil Fawlty
In the 1970's BBC comedy show Fawlty Towers, John Cleese manages to turn harmless everyday situations into total disasters, with very little effort. It is a marvellous example of how to inject faults into what could have been a smoothly operating hotel, and demonstrating just how things fall apart as the unexpected happens. Injecting faults isn't always that easy, unfortunately (or should that be fortunately)? I recently read an article by Steve Chessin in ACM Queue about fault injection, where he discusses how the UltraSPARC II and III systems from the late 1990s and early 2000s supported hardware fault injection... Continue reading
Posted Oct 15, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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Physical or Virtual
Posted Oct 6, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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Virtual Trace
I spent most of last week at the S4D conference in Southampton, the UK. A small gathering of people interested in debug, it seems to be a good indicator of trends in debug. The dominant trends this year were clearly tracing and instrumentation. From the perspective of a virtual platform, tracing is a natural task, and it can be done with much less pain than on a physical platform. Tracing on a piece of hardware requires that the processor or SoC at the heart of the system has an interface that can communicate a trace to an external trace box,... Continue reading
Posted Sep 23, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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Variable and Deterministic
Posted Sep 9, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints
Posted Aug 31, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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Interview with Girish Venkatasubramanian
Posted Aug 26, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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Shiny Old Hardware
Posted Aug 20, 2010 at Jakob Engblom
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I couldn't agree more that testing seems to be having some kind of crisis. The number of flaws spotted in the wild is amazing/appalling (choose one). What I often see missing is that deep understanding for a product and the destructive creativity that starts with how it might actually be used and then go on to find the scenarios that nobody in development thought about. Testing is really just as important as development, and you want just as sharp people in there as in product creation - but with a different aptitude.
I walked through some recent examples of bugs that you think should not have escaped, at http://jakob.engbloms.se/archives/1185 and http://jakob.engbloms.se/archives/1147
It’s Time for Testers to Step Up
RTC Magazine recently published an article that I wrote called "Time to Rethink Software Testing for Embedded Devices". In it I describe some of the new techniques that are possible, and I believe necessary, to delivery high quality device software for embedded devices. When staying 'positive'...
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