Devil : an IDL for hardware programming

Abstract

: To keep up with the frantic pace at which devices come out, drivers need to be quickly developed, debugged and tested. Although a driver is a critical system component, the driver development process has made little (if any) progress. The situation is particularly disastrous when considering the hardware operating code (i.e., the layer interacting with the device). Writing this code often relies on an inaccurate or incomplete device documentation and involves assembly-level operations. As a result, hardware operating code is tedious to write, prone to errors, and hard to debug and maintain. This paper presents a new approach to developing hardware operating code based on an Interface Definition Language (IDL) for hardware functionalities, named Devil. This IDL allows a high-level definition of the communication with a device. A compiler automatically checks the consistency of a Devil definition and generates efficient low-level code. Our contributions are as follows. ffl We introd...