Wind River Introduces Quick Start Capability for Wind River Simics

Wind River Simics now includes Quick Start Platform (QSP), which provides a synthetic virtual platform coupled with an instruction set simulator for specific architectures. QSP is also bundled with board support packages (BSPs) for VxWorks® and Linux, including additional BSPs planned for the latest versions of Wind River Linux, which makes for a convenient development platform for developers, especially those creating user-level application software not tied to the specifics of the target hardware.

“Using simulation provides significant savings in total cost of ownership and time, especially when working on complex systems. Wind River Simics not only enables application development to begin earlier but can also help determine the most appropriate system designs and ease hardware migration,” said Michel Genard, vice president of tools and lifecycle solutions at Wind River. “With Wind River Simics, developers can get hands-on experience and take advantage of virtual platforms and simulation techniques much sooner.”

While industry research has indicated growth in the adoption of virtual system prototyping and simulation tools, timely project completion rates are still a challenge, especially for complex projects.1 Wind River Simics provides a fast and easy jump start for developers, and in turn, helping to further encourage adoption of simulation.

By using Wind River Simics right away, developers can immediately benefit from capabilities such as reverse execution and checkpointing. In reverse execution, the ability to back up and redo program runs allows for close and repeated examination of a run, producing the same results each time. Repeatability and reversibility are valuable in the development and debugging of complex software, and are capabilities not possible with a physical machine. Checkpoints provide a precise snapshot of an entire system’s state. A software tester can alert developers to a bug by taking a checkpoint and passing it along so they can resume execution precisely from the perspective of the tester.

As a full system simulator, Wind River Simics can simulate any target hardware system, from a single processor board, a multi-core system or an entire system containing hundreds of boards with different architectures. Unmodified target software binaries can run on a Simics simulation as if on the actual physical hardware.