During development with Wind River Workbench, I use VxWorks Simulator to test code. I also heard of Simics is a virtual environment which can run VxWorks. Are Simics and VxWorks Simulator the same thing?
They are 2 different products.
VxSim is bundled with the vxWorks development environment and provides a simple x86 virtual board with memory, a serial port and possibly a network connection. You can not simulate real devices like A/D, PCI devices, etc... in vxSim
Simics in comparison is an actual system simulation environment, where an entire hardware platform is emulated, including CPU, hardware devices (PCI bus, A/D converters, FPGA, etc...) and it can run the exact same binary as the real board would.
Simics is also not restricted to vxWorks. A simics simulation could run any software: Windows, Linux, other OSes.
I agree with Benoit and would like to add that. Simics simulates how a complete system works, which often in one simulation may includes mixed technologies: multiple boards running multiple OS including VxWorks or Linux. They can connect within Simics virtual ethernet network and exchange data packets.
VxSim is much more straight forward, which only emulate one instant of VxWorks running.
Related
I would like to use a windows machine as a USB488/USBTMC device. USB488/USBTMC is a reimplementation of the good old GPIB/IEEE-488 on USB rails. But most articles on the topic refer to a Windows machine as a host/controller. The Windows USB stack is not well suited for USB device/USB OTG modes. However, if you look at some of the high-end gear like oscilloscopes and spectrum/network analyzers, it is well known that they are often Windows machines inside with some additional hardware. So, how it is done?
To some background: it is a project to retrofit a very old SEM microscope with new hardware. The current one is a 68k custom system with a CRT that uses a GPIB interface for comm with a PC. Things like sample spectroscopy are done as a BASIC program running on a pc and communicating through that gpib port. The plan is to replace that 68k junk with a modern day windows pc with an FPGA on a PCIe bus. For compatibility reasons, it would be nice to have a usb488 port in the new PC. Though I have no idea of how to do it properly. The only solution I have so far is to have some cheap USB-capable micro hanging on the SPI bus on the FPGA facing side and a USBTDM class on the USB side. But maybe Im missing something and there is a specific thing or chip that exists that can do it that Im not aware of.
I can only speculate how high-end oscilloscopes achieve it. The most likely option is that they use a dedicated chip like a MAX3420E. It is connected via SPI. Part of the USB protocol is implemented by the chip, part of it will be implemented by the oscilloscope software.
Most USB controllers chips found in PCs can operate as the host only. And even if they could do a role swap, Windows (for Desktop) has not supported device/peripheral mode until recently. It now does. See USB Dual Role Driver Stack Architecture. But I don't fully understand it to tell you what hardware you would need to purchase where this feature is enabled.
Role swapping is very common on smartphones. It is also implemented in Linux (search for "Linux USB gadget"). Many Apple Macs can run in Target Disk Mode, which is a USB device/peripheral mode as well.
I hear a lot about "Hypervisors are not emulators. If you need to emulate another hardware specifications than you computer have, you need to use emulator, not hypervisor".
Well, but yesterday I saw this video on youtube - click here - which shows how to install Win 95 on modern macOS with VMware Fusion.
The strange thing for me is that on 17:39 you could see that Win 95 virtual machine is "Pentium Pro with 64 MB RAM".
Hmm! So, Fusion somehow faked processor and RAM, right? But it is not emulator, right? So, does it mean that any hypervisor can fake processor and RAM?
At the time of its release, Windows 95 only had code to recognize CPUIDs up to Pentium Pro. Any processor not lower than Pentium Pro is "called" Pentium Pro.
The main difference is the Hypervisor cannot emulate CPU code. All code must run on the original processor.
The hypervisor does emulate the BIOS, which in tells the OS the hardware specs available; including RAM, Boot order and peripherals attached.
When you are talking about VMWare Fusion the way this works depends on how virtualization is achieved. According to wikipedia VMWare Fusion utilizes hardware-assisted virtualization, dynamic binary translation, and para-virtualization.
In the hardware-assited virtualization case, #Strom is correct and guest instructions can be executed directly on the host CPU. Besides #Strom answer, you can fake the CPU type by trapping and emulating the cpuid instruction.
In the para-virtualization case you replace critical instructions by calls to the hypervisor which emulates the instruction on behalf of the guest. So again you emulate the cpuid instruction to "fake" the CPU type. Keep in mind that this requires a modified, hence para-virtualized, guest operating system.
Finally, dynamic binary translation scans the guest code for critical instructions during runtime and either replaces them by traps into the hypervisor achieving some kind of "live para-virtualization" or translating blocks of guest code into equivalent blocks of host code that modifies the VM state according to the original guest code (this is e.g. how the QEMU full system emulator works). As a result, again you are able to "fake" the CPU type by emulating the cpuid instruction. Notice that guest and host can be the same architecture in this case, but there is no need for this.
Of course a combination of above techniques is also feasible.
As for virtualization of main memory, the hypervisor is in full control of the hardware so you can simply configure a VM with just 64MB of main memory. The VM is not able to "see" more than this due to the techniques shortly discussed above.
Please keep in mind that this just gives a very short overview of virtualization and I tried to keep it short and informative, so I know my explanations are partially not very accurate. If you are really interested in virtualization I recommend reading "Virtual Machines: Versatile Platforms for Systems and Processes" or the papers on the topic by Popek & Goldberg and "Xen and the Art of Virtualization"
How is it possible to determine the commands to operate a usb device, if that device comes from another operating system and traffic monitoring software cannot be installed on that OS. The only method i can think of is sending random commands to the device, until the device responds, but this seems implausible for more complex commands, and potentially dangerous. For example, consider the DualShock 4 controller. Sony has not made an official driver for this device, so what method can i use to create a linux driver for it?
Get a hardware protocol analyzer. Then you won't need to install any software on the host or device under test. Here is one that I have used:
http://www.totalphase.com/products/beagle-usb12/
I've been looking at QEMU for a while now and I've been trying to find out if I can use it to simulate a device that we are developing.
The device will be powered by an ARM Cortex M3 and QEMU is well suited for emulation of its software.
What I want to know is if anyone has used QEMU in the past as a simulator?
The intent is to use QEMU to do black-box testing of the software before rolling it out to the devices in the field.
This would involve being able to monitor and modify the memory location in which your Parallel Input/Output (PIO) pins are configured and set and the memory locations of all other peripherals externally.
Now, considering that some of the peripherals would be PWM and UART, it is clear that there will be a need to resolve synchronization issues. However, I would like to avoid this topic for the time being and stick only to simple PIO.
The QEMU Monitor gets close but is not quite there yet.
So to summarize:
I need to know if there is a way to interrupt QEMU after each CPU clock cycle and read/write to a small number of memory locations in the code memory.
Did you try to use GDB stub ? You can use -s -S and connect through gdb by target remote :1234. This will give you control over program executed inside vm and access to registers and memory.
If hardware support is a must for virtualization, how can Java Virtual Machines run on machines without support for virtualization ? Or is JVM not a virtual machine ?
A JVM is not virtual in the same sense as a VirtualBox or VMWare virtual machine. It is a 'machine' that implements the Java bytecode, not a virtualized version of actual hardware.
The term-of-art 'virtual machine' was coined a very long time ago for the following scenario:
make up a computer, like Knuth's MIX.
write a computer program that implements the made-up computer.
run programs
When this virtual machine runs, it's a completely ordinary program, running completely in user mode. It needs no special help from the hardware or operating system to work reasonably well. This is especially true of the JVM, since the Java byte code does not deal with low-level hardware I/O or other things which are hard to simulate.
Later, historically, (to pick a particular instance), IBM invented VM/370. VM/370 uses the other sense of the term 'virtual machine'. In this later sense, the hardware and operating system cooperate to allow a single physical machine to host multiple virtual instances of (more or less) the same architecture, in which multiple copies of the whole operating system are written as if they are running on more or less bare hardware. Later, the X86 was designed with features to facilitate this.
So, yes, any virtual machine is making use of some physical hardware, unless you implement it with pieces of paper passed around a table (pace John Searle). But when the virtual machine bears no resemblance to the machine it is running on, then there's no need for special help from the operating system and hardware, and no need for anything as complex as VM/370, or VMware.
If hardware support is a must for virtualization, ...
Let me stop you right there :-)
There is a difference in concept between the JVM (software virtualization) and (for example) a VMWare VM (hardware-assisted virtualization).
The JVM (and other software-based VMMs such as the ones that allow to to emulate x86 on Solaris hardware - I think Bochs and possibly DosBox fall into this category) runs like any other application, using the operating system to gain access to the hardware, or emulating its own hardware purely in software.
VMWare, and the other VMMs optimised for speed, rely on hardware support. In other words, they run on the hardware as if they have full access to the hardware and, only when they try to do something they're not supposed to does the OS captures that attempt and fake it.
That's why VMWare runs so much faster than the software-only emulators. It's because, for the vast majority of the time, it's actually running on the real hardware.
The JVM is a virtual machine, but it doesn't require any additional support from the Operating System. Instead of virtualising instructions for a particular CPU it executes java bytecode.
The JVM is a virtual machine for running Java, in other words it emulates a machine which would be capable of running java. It is a confusing choice of names, but it comes from the general meaning of "machine" not from the more common Virtual Machine meaning.
The JVM, like a regular VM emulates the execution of instructions, but in the case of the JVM the instructions being emulated are Java Instructions, and in the case of a VM they are Hardware Instructions as would be executed by an OS running on the same hardware.
Yes the JVM does access hardware, however this is why you install a MAC or WINDOWS JVM since the instructions are translated by the JVM and acted upon depending on the installation of the JVM, for example, open file dialog on mac opens the mac dialog and windows JVM opens the windows dialog.
So its not being virtualized by the system, but the bytecode is being virtualized by the JVM you installed. It's basically like an application that reads something(bytecode) and does something(access hardware, or other stuff).
It should be noted that nothing stipulates that a JVM does not (have to) have HW virtualization access. There are notable exceptions, but to which the answered poster alluded, few CPs exist that run Java bytecode natively. Maybe someday a Java bytecode HAL or TIMI will be commonplace to put the JVM into the same class as the formalized HW virtualization?