Re: [Simulavr-devel] simulavrxx plugin interfaces

[Klaus Rudolph]

Hi all :-)

> > As far as I can tell there are two mechanisms to simulating hardware
> > outside the device – C++ modules like the lcd and modules written in
> > another language that connect via some sort of network socket.  Does
> > anyone have any more example code or documentation that they can share
> > regarding these two mechanisms.  One thing, I’d like to know for example
> > is how to actually “hook-in” a module like the lcd module I saw in the
> > source directory.  I gather that its probably done via the scripting
> > interface but that’s all I’ve got so far.
> >    
> Well, I wrote a short patch for simulavrxx a while ago that allows it to 
> interface with icarus verilog. 
>
> This way, any plugin you write is more general and can be used by any code 
> that can be plugged into icarus. I think it is a bad idea if every uC 
> simulator comes with its own set of reinvented LCD modules etc.
>  
Yes, the actual situation is that there a lot of simulators are on the 
"market" and also open source ones. And some of them implement some kind 
of "outside world" interfaces and some devices for that kind of 
interface. There is a total lag of "standards" I think. Ore the existing 
ones are not fullfilling all requirements. For my! purpose I need a very 
fast simulation. One of my design target was simply speed. Most of 
things could be implemented in a much better "object oriented" way with 
less "side effects". But I had not found a "better" way to do it as fast 
as it is in the moment. I need! simulation of 20 and more cores with a 
real environment to do full integration and system test. And my last 
simulations run more than 24 hours on my pc. We had sometimes discussed 
cleaner solutions but could not find a match for speed and claerness :-(.

One idea I had in the past was:
Maybe you know the gnu eda (geda) project? There is allready a set of 
circuit simulations, circuit drawing tools and a lot more stuff like 
part library and so on. Maybe we could have some kind of a gui for the 
simulator like a circuit editor, have the library from the geda tool 
chain with the desriptions added for the simulation? Maybe...
One of the work before is to watch out for all other open source 
simulators and look for nice features. Maybe there are also nice 
implementations. After collecting all the informations we?/you could 
decide what is the best solution and start to integrate/merge the 
different simulators....
But this is a lot of work. And yes, as allready mentioned: I have 
actually no spare time for that project at all. And I have actually no 
project for avr, so I could not test the simulator as a side effect of 
my main work :-(

I found years ago an arm simulator with flash devices allready build in. 
Dont know how that was implemented. There is a universe outside...
catch the stars! :-)

Good luck!
Klaus