HAIL is a high-level domain-specific language that helps writing device drivers. Specifically it eases the development of device access code and help avoiding bugs in the access code.
Devlopers first write HAIL specification, which consists of four parts: (1) register map description, which describes the various device registers and bit fields, (2) address space description, which describes the mechanisms for accessing a bus, (3) device instantiation, which describes the actual instantiation of the device in the particular system, and (4) invariant specification, which describes the constraints on accessing the device.
The register map description and invariant specification in HAIL specification are usually translated from device documentation directly. The address space specification depends on the system /CPU architecture and sometimes the OS. Device instantiation is tied to the specific driver’s needs.
A HAIL compiler translates the specification into C code for accessing registers. In a simplified view, the generated code is a list of get_xxx()/set_xxx() for all registers and bit fields, put together in a C header file. Optionally the generated code can also have run-time debugging code that catches any violations of the specified invariants.
The device driver includes the generated header file and uses the get_xxx()/set_xxx() function to access the device registers, without concerning about the underlying device base addresses, bus attributes, data width, endianess and etc.. Additionally, the device driver can manipulate bit fields directly using these functions and hence avoid many explicit bit manipulations.
The diagram below illustrates the process of HAIL approach. For more details please see the paper and specification below.
The HAIL compiler binary release will come soon (we hope!) If you like to obtain one to evaluate, please let us know and we will work harder to make that happen.
Our experiemental platform is Arcom's VIPER board. We have chose serial driver and ethernet (SMSC 91C111) as our study subjects on Linux and NetBSD. Linux kernel is a port of 2.4.26 to this board and NetBSD kernel is NetBSD 2.0 to VIPER board.
We also performed netperf tests over ethernet on both Linux and NetBSD. See the results for Linux and NetBSD.
For now please email your questions to the authors. In the future if there are enough interestes, we will create a mailing list. Stay tuned.
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