Running Scenarios

There are five buttons on the Simulation toolbar to control the execution of a Scenario. If necessary, select View‑>Toolbars‑>Simulation to display the Simulation toolbar. Once you have a Scenario loaded, the buttons or their corresponding function keys allow you to:

•Run (F5)

•Step (F10)

•Pause (Shift-F5)

•Stop (F6)

•Rewind (F7)

These functions are also available on the main menu under Simulation.

When a scenario has been successfully created and is ready to run, the Run button is displayed green ().  Click the run button to run the scenario.

When the scenario finishes, the Rewind button changes from gray to orange (). Click it to clear actual signal patterns and reset the Scenario and all test cases back to the beginning. Rewind does not change the current value of Signals. See System Reset.

MxVDev schedules events (such as changes to input signals, and execution of functions) to occur at particular test steps. Step causes MxVDev to execute a single step for the TestCase that currently has the focus. It is enabled only when the focused TestCase is in PAUSED state.  Note that other TestCases (which don't have the focus) may execute several test steps during that period.

There are two ways to configure the Pause button. See Pause Button Behavior in Project Settings.

Certain events can occur during execution of a Scenario that cause the Scenario to not complete successfully.  For example, if a Transform in the Harness fails to find a referenced file or generates an overflow, then the Scenario cannot run to completion and pass. This is classified as a Run-Time Event, and the MxV RunTime Event System Signal captures information about when the event occurred and what happened. See System Signals—MxV RunTime Event.

You can use the right-click menu to terminate a job without stopping the Scenario. Click on the job in the Scenario box, right-click, and select Trigger Job Complete. The job immediately terminates and the next scheduled job(s) start.

The status bar at the bottom of the screen displays the amount of Virtual Memory (VM) being used by MxVDev.

Status Bar

•If you do not have sufficient RAM installed on your computer, disk swapping slows execution.

•For the 32-bit version of MxVDev, if virtual memory usage exceeds 1600 MB, MxVDev may experience an out-of-memory failure. Adding additional RAM does not remove this limitation.

•Memory usage is mostly linked to the number of transitions. Image signal transitions in particular use a large amount of memory.

•You can use External Data files to reduce memory usage. See Using an External Data Source.

The status bar displays time from the beginning of the scenario in Simulation Time and Real Time. At a given time, it shows the elapsed time for the current test case plus the time for all previous tests.

The Clock-source can be temporarily changed using the Switch Clock button on the Simulation toolbar:

indicates that the current Clock-source is the MxClock (accelerated time).

indicates that the current Clock-source is the  RTClock (real-time). When the RTClock is used simulation time and real time are the same.

Only one of these icons is displayed at any one time.  Clicking on it toggles to the other setting.  Note that the Clock-source setting on the Execution tab of the Project Settings is unaffected by this, providing an easy way to test using either of these two modes without having to change the project.