Visual Model for Device Driver Development

Abstract

Device driver development is a responsible software development discipline which is known as a field that demands expert skills and experiences. Though it is important to that level, still driver development is a less facilitated software development field relative to other categories such as networking, Internet programming, and application development. On the other hand limited number of experts cannot handle the increasing growth of hardware devices and it causes drivers not to be developed for some operating system. Visual aided software development is not a new concept today. Object oriented development, hardware chip manufacturing, network designing and many other technical fields are supported by various visual modeling or programming languages. But when comes to device drivers, there is no such modeling or visualizing language/tool to be found. This research derives a visual modeling language using basic concepts found in device drivers and provides parsing and skeleton code generation methods for the language. Model consists with a single view which expresses several aspects common to all device drivers. Event driven nature of the driver, data transfers and transforms, synchronization mechanisms are the main features of the language. Language by its design, is platform independent which means no platform specific assumption has been taken in forming the grammar of the language. Proposed visual language is a highly generalize one, but still sufficient enough to hold necessary details for skeleton of the driver source code to be generated. Prototype implementation of the proposed development model was named as Visual driver . It is a customizable tool that allows defining new symbols based on primitive symbols and using them afterwords within the workspace. Developer can change the generating code by modifying code templates. Unlike with conventional compilers visual driver does not hard code its code templates to the binary file. It was created for with Linux operating system and generates skeleton codes for some basic drivers in Linux.