We’ve made a change in the way we build simulations to eliminate multiple warnings that used to be generated by some firewall software (the most annoying being the built-in firewall that comes with Windows, because it  even warns about completely safe local traffic between programs on your system). We no longer create an executable called simxsim.exe each time a simulation is built that needs a new validation by the firewall (for details, see my previous post about firewalls).

Now when you build a simulation, we create a shared library called simxsim.dll (or simxsim.so on Unix), instead. To perform a simulation, an executable program called simxloader.exe is run, and this exe loads and runs the simxsim shared library that represents the actual simulation. Simxloader doesn’t change, so once it’s been validated once by your firewall, it doesn’t have be revalidated again every time you build a new simulation. Peace between VeriLogger and overly picky firewalls has finally been declared!

If you’ve read the previous post on how the various programs communicate in Verilogger, the only change is that where it previously read simxsim.exe, now it should read simxloader.exe (simxloader.exe is installed in the bin subdirectory of the SynaptiCAD installation directory with our other pre-built programs). The Simxsim shared library is built in the current working directory (the directory where your project file is located if you’re building with the BugHunter debugging GUI).