A DSL approach to improve productivity and safety in device drivers development

  • L. Réveillère
  • , F. Mérillon
  • , C. Consel
  • , R. Marlet
  • , G. Muller

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Although new peripheral devices are emerging at a frantic pace and require the fast release of drivers, little progress has been made to improve the development of such device drivers. Too often, this development consists of decoding hardware intricacies, based on inaccurate documentation. Then, assembly-level operations need to be used to interact with the device. These low-level operations reduce the readability of the driver and prevent safety properties from being checked. This paper presents an approach based on domain-specific languages (DSLs) to overcome these problems. We define a language, named Devil (DEVice Interaction Language), dedicated to defining the basic communication with a device. Unlike a general-purpose language, Devil allows a description to be checked for consistency. This not only improves the safety of the interaction with the device but also uncovers bugs early in the development process. To asses our approach, we have shown that Devil is expressive enough to specify a large number of devices. To evaluate productivity and safety improvements over traditional development in C, we report an experiment based on mutation testing.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings ASE 2000
Subtitle of host publication15th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages101-109
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)0769507107, 9780769507101
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2000
Externally publishedYes
Event15th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2000 - Grenoble, France
Duration: 11 Sept 200015 Sept 2000

Publication series

NameProceedings ASE 2000: 15th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

Conference

Conference15th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2000
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityGrenoble
Period11/09/0015/09/00

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