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S4D 2012 – Notes
Last week, I attended my fourth System, Software, SoC and Silicon Degug conference (S4D) in a row. I think the silicon part is getting less attention these days, most of the papers were on how to debug...
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Wind River Blog: Exposing OS Kernel Races with Landslide
There is a new blog post on my Wind River blog, about the Landslide system from CMU. It is a pretty impressive Master’s Thesis project that used the control that Simics has over interrupts to...
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Logging (Some More Thoughts)
Logging as as debug method is not new, and I have been writing about it to and from over the past few years myself. At the S4D conference, tracing and logging keeps coming up as a topic (see my...
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Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging
Last year, I did a Simics webinar which included a two-part demo of how to use Simics to debug an endianness bug in a networked system as it migrates from big-endian to a little-endian system. Along...
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Wind River Blog: TCF and Simics
On my Wind River blog, you can now find a description on how we have used the Eclipse TCF (target connection framework) to build the Simics GUI. Or rather, the connection between the Simics GUI and the...
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Book Review: If I Only Changed the Software, why is the Phone on Fire?
This blog post is a review of the book “If I Only Changed the Software, why is the Phone on Fire“, (see more information on Amazon, for example), by Lisa Simone. The book was released in 2007, on the...
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Book Review: Debugging
Debugging – the 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David Agans was published in 2002, based on several decades of practical experience in...
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I Planted a Bug for Myself to Find…
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....
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Wind River Blog: UEFI on Simics
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...
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Microsoft Catapult – Real Interesting Research at Real Scale
At the ISCA 2014 conference (the biggest event in computer architecture research), a group of researchers from Microsoft Research presented a paper on their Catapult system. The full title of the paper...
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Hardware debug and measurement in the IBM POWER8
I have read some recent IBM articles about the POWER8 processor and its hardware debug and trace facilities. They are very impressive, and quite interesting to compare to what is usually found in the...
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rr– The Mozilla Reverse Debugger
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” [http://rr-project.org/] has been developed by the Firefox developers at...
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Intel Blog: Finding a Linux Kernel bug by running Simics on Simics
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...
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A new (and old) Reverse Debugger – Microsoft WinDbg
A blog post from Undo Software informed me that Microsoft has rather quietly released a reverse debugger tool for Windows programs – WinDbg with Time Travel Debug. It is available in the latest preview...
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Undo Reverse Debugger “Pivots” to Record-Replay
I just found a story about Undo software that was rather interesting from a strategic perspective. “Patient capital from CIC gives ‘time travelling’ company Undo space to pivot“, from the...
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Borland Turbo Debugger – Reverse Execution in 1992
Thanks to a tip from “Derek” on a previous blog post about a replay debugger from 1995, I was made aware of the reverse execution ability that was available in the Borland Turbo Debugger version 3.0...
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Intel Blog Post: Simics in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge
The US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) ran a “Cyber Grand Challenge” in 2016, where automated cyber-attack and cyber-defense systems were pitted against each other to drive progress in...
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“Studying the Advancement in Debugging Practice” / 2016 Paper
I find debugging a very interesting topic of study, so when I stumbled on the paper “Studying the advancement in debugging practice of professional software developers”, I had to do a blog on its...
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Intel Blog Post: “Quit Thinking and Look”– Mea Culpa Chasing a Performance Bug
I have written before about the debug advice to “Quit thinking and look.” It means that you should not form conclusions prematurely. Stop and look at what is going on instead of guessing and cooking...
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Intel Blog: Catching a Tricky Bug by Running Simics on Simics
I recently published a long post on the Intel Community Blog, talking about how my colleague Evgeny solved a nicely complicated bug using Simics-on-Simics. The bug involved UEFI, an operating system,...
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