Limitations

While the client-server architecture is powerful approach due to its versatile application scenarios, it also reveals a major drawback: Clients potentially compete for resources. The probably most simple approach conflicts is to use only one instance of a client for modifying the emulator’s state (i.e. a single Monitor instance), but as many read-only clients as desired.

Concurrency

The probably most prominent concurrency issue is concurrent allocation and access of instruction memory. For example, no one prevents you from starting two instances of a Monitor client, that both write program instructions into the same or at least overlapping memory areas. The Raspberry Pi foundation’s Pico C SDK provides special methods to allocate instruction memory, thus preventing you from accidentally loading a program into a memory area that is already in use. Note that allocation is a feature of the Pico C SDK, and not of the RP2040 itself. This works well as long as there is only a single instance of the Pico C SDK running, which usually applies.

The RP2040 emulator provides its own Java SDK that provides methods equivalent to the functions of the Pico C SDK (but limited to those functions that are relevant for the emulation of the two PIOs). Likewise, the Java SDK implements memory allocation also as a feature that is bound to the Java SDK instance that is in use. However, in a multi-client environment, each client runs a Java SDK instance of its own and within a JVM of its own. That is, if you are running multiple instances of the Monitor application, no monitor will know about the allocation status of any other monitor. Hence, protection against accidental overwrite will work only within a single monitor instance, but not across multiple monitors.

Similarly, if you are running a TimingDiagram and a Monitor in parallel (which is basically ok), be aware that running a monitor script from within the TimingDiagram will ignore any memory marked as allocated in your Monitor instance (i.e. you may expect that the TimingDiagram possibly overwrites your PIO program, even if it is marked as allocated in the monitor).

Note

For the future, I may decide to implement PIO instruction memory allocation as a feature of the emulator itself (rather than as a feature of the SDK, as it is implemented at the moment). In that case, all monitor instances (and all other clients) would have access to allocation information and thus could avoid accidental modification of memory that is marked as allocated. However, be aware, that memory allocation is nevertheless designed as a safety feature rather than as a security feature. No one prevents a client from directly writing instruction op-codes into memory area that is marked as allocated, since the RP2040’s register interface allows any client to overwrite instruction op-codes at any time, regardless of any allocation marks.

Lost Updates

Imagine one client modifies, say, the contents of one of the PIO’s FIFOs, and then does not further observe any modifications. In the meantime, another client may modifiy the same FIFO, without the first client noticing the change (unless it actively checks for such changes). If the first client, assuming that the FIFO has not changed in the meantime, applies further operations that depend on the FIFOs contents, unexpected changes of the FIFOs may result in unexpected behaviour of that client.

The emulator already provides a function waiting for a register’s value to change. Using this function, a client may observe register values that it depends on and thus properly react onto unexpected changes. However, the implementation of the wait function is currently limited. Registers are checked for modification only once per clock cycle, but not for modifications that occur during a single clock cycle. Therefore, there is currently no reliable way of observing registers if any changes must be granted to be recognized. Currently, the best approach for a client is to regularly poll for changes of register values that it relies on.

A future version of the register facade implementation may introduce a feature for a client to retrieve and hold a lock on an arbitrary set of registers and release the lock only after it has completed all updates to these registers. This way, modification of a set of registers could be made an atomic operation from all client’s point of view.

Race Conditions

The implementation of the local register facade currently directly accesses the PIOs’ internal variables, rather than a copy made after each clock cycles. If a client happens to access a register while a clock cycle is in progress, the client may see spurious data hazards. For example, if multiple state machines are actively writing different values to the same GPIO pin during the same clock cycle, finally one state machine will eventually win, according to the ouput priority rules as specified in the GPIO Mappings section of the RP2040 datasheet. Currently the best approach to circumvent this flaw is to follow the following rules:

  • Ensure that only a single client triggers clock cycles. In particular, do not run multiple instances of a monitor for simultaneously triggering clock cycles from different monitors.
  • After triggering a clock cycle, the client should sleep for a short period (~1ms should be sufficient for a typical notebook or desktop environment, if the CPU is otherwise idle), thus giving the emulator enough time to fully execute the triggered instruction before the client inspects the results of the instruction that has been executed.
  • Other clients should frequently poll for changes that they depend on, but should expect to see spurious hazards.

A future version of the emulator’s implementation may work on a duplicate set of internal registers, with one internal active set of registers, and the other one exposed to the register interface, and swapping between both register sets after each clock cycle. This way, no hazards resulting from internal operation will show up through the register facade.

Summary

For safe operation of clients without unexpected behaviour, you are advised to obey the following rules:

  • Do not run multiple instances of the Monitor application at the same time against the same emulation server instance, unless you really know what you are doing.
  • However, use as many read-only clients (observers) in parallel as you like, such as the GPIOObserver. Though, in rare case and under special circumstances, they might show spurious value hazards.
  • When concurrently running a Monitor and a TimingDiagram (which is basically fine), be aware that executing a monitor from within the TimingDiagram script will ignore your monitor’s memory allocation marks and thus may unexpectedly overwrite your PIO instruction memory without any further warning.
  • While the TimingDiagram executes a monitor script, do not concurrently perform any actions in a concurrently running Monitor.