A system development tool like Simics is rarely used completely on its own. Simics is usually brought in by companies and development teams who are already using a variety of tools and expect to keep doing so along with Simics. Also, Simics by itself cannot reasonably be expected to solve all problems for all people. Instead, we need to connect Simics with outside tools to provide an integrated solution.
In this blog post, Jay Thomas of LDRA and I will discuss one concrete example of such a tool integration. In particular, how Simics can be used together with the code coverage and certification tools from LDRA to perform code analysis on safety-critical software in a way that is more efficient than with most hardware platforms.
A virtual platform like Wind River Simics is generally designed to be deterministic. Determinism brings a host of benefits to users (repeatability of bugs, reverse execution, bug transportation, etc.), but is also easily misunderstood. Quite often, users fear that they will lose an important "feature" of a physical machine - its built-in variation across runs of the same software. If the virtual platform is deterministic, surely it will not expose all the different ways a program can run that you get on a random physical machine? Yes it can.
There is a huge difference between the repeatable determinism of a virtual machine and completely invariant, predictable, predetermined behavior.
Jakob Engblom is Technical Marketing Manager for the Simics product line at Wind River. He came to Wind River with the Virtutech acquisition in March 2010, and has been working with Simics since 2002. As technical marketing manager, he works with the what and how of Simics usage, including actually writing real code.
The postings on this site are the views of the individual poster and do not represent Wind River's positions, strategies or opinions. Please review the Wind River Blogging Guidelines. We may be reached via email at blogs@windriver.com.
Jakob Engblom is Technical Marketing Manager for the Simics product line at Wind River. He came to Wind River with the Virtutech acquisition in March 2010, and has been working with Simics since 2002. As technical marketing manager, he works with the what and how of Simics usage, including actually writing real code.
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