AW: [ixp1200] SDK 2 ACE sample simulation

[Mirko Benz]

Uday,

Of course it is not sufficient to simulate alone, but:

- Much of the functionality of the IDE is useless (e.g. for
optimization).
- How should one select a specific NPU (speed grade, memory ...) when
one can not simply evaluate them in a simulation?
- What about forthcoming chips?
- What about a customer that simply wants to evaluate different NPU
architectures for a specific project?
- How should one use external simulation models?
- What about a group of developers - one evaluation system for every
developer is a bit expensive.
- Most samples supplied require very little initialization from the SA
part.

What we did was to copy and modify old init scripts from SDK 1.x samples
and modify them as appropriate. Then we developed our new code in the
IDE and tested it afterwards in hardware (IXP12EB). Having to analyze
every memory access and reinventing the wheel slows down. 

I hope this situation changes - where possible - for SDK 3.

Regards,
Mirko

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: owner-ixp1200 at CS.Princeton.EDU
[mailto:owner-ixp1200 at CS.Princeton.EDU] Im Auftrag von Naik, Uday
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 10. April 2002 18:18
An: 'ixp1200 at CS.Princeton.EDU'
Betreff: RE: [ixp1200] SDK 2 ACE sample simulation

Yes. This was intentional. 

In the microACE model, the ACE component on the SA core is critical in
that
it configures
the data structures needed by the microcode, patches symbols, handles
exception packets,
exports an API for user applications etc. Without the core component the
functionality 
of the microACE is quite incomplete. While it is possible to write ind
files
to get the
microcode running, it is relatively difficult to test/use all the
features
without the 
core component. It is also easy to change and misconfigure something
using
the ind files.

For this reason, the ACE samples were extensively QA'ed on hardware
only. We
do ship
the workbench projects running on hardware. All customers of the SDK
were
supposed to
get associated reference hardware. So not shipping the ind files was not
considered an
issue.

Uday

-----Original Message-----
From: Mirko Benz [mailto:benz at mephisto.inf.tu-dresden.de]
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 2:30 AM
To: ixp1200 at CS.Princeton.EDU
Subject: [ixp1200] SDK 2 ACE sample simulation


Hi,

The ACE samples supplied with SDK 2 do not contain any simulation
initialization scripts (*.ind). Therefore, one can not use the workbench
for simulation and evaluation of these samples. Is this intended? 

Thanks,
Mirko

University of Technology Dresden, Germany