Abstraction of Device Drivers and Inputs of the Device Driver Generation System for UNIX-like Operating Systems

摘要

Writing device drivers spends much time and makes efforts because it needs knowledge of the target device and operating system (OS). In order to lighten the burden, the authors have proposed the device driver generation system before. The system generates a source code of a device driver from three inputs: the device driver specification, the OS dependent specification, and the device dependent specification. Generating device drivers by using the system, however, is not always effective because the burden in describing the device dependent specification, which is one of the inputs, is nearly as same as the traditional method. In this paper, device drivers are abstracted again, and each input is defined afresh, and then more reduction of the burden is aimed at. As an example of the description, an interrupt handler of a network device, FreeBSD and Linux as the target OS, and Etherlink XL as the target device are chosen.