Abstract

Proprietary I/O devices are often involved in many computer application systems,especially in embedded systems. In such scenarios, Developers have to develop drivers for these devices to utilize them under some embedded operating system. Traditionally, development of device driver can undertake only after hardware design finishes, for the writing and debugging process involve many… interactions with real hardware. However, with the increasing competition among corporations, shorter time to market is important for a successful production. To shorten the development cycle of device driver, this paper propose that using a simulation device as the target of driver's operation. Previous works on device simulation focus on how to support development of application level software. VxSim[1], a component in Vxworks Tornado environment for platform simulation, only support application software which requiring very simple interactions with hardware, but is not suitable for software with extensive device accesses, especially device drivers. A simulation development method for device drive is proposed in paper[2], which simulate all system routines in a application and compile and link the driver source code with the application together. This method can only make some testing work on device driver, but cannot support the simulation of the running of the entire application system that based on the device driver. This paper presents a device simulation mechanism based on an abstraction model of I/O devices. Then a simulation framework for device driver development is discussed. This framework can effectively support writing and debugging of device driver without the need of hardware existence. For the running of application software is relying on the underlying device driver, it is natural that this framework also supports the development of the entire system without requiring hardware involvement.

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