A DSL Approach to Improve Productivity 
and Safety in Device Drivers Development




Gilles Muller


Mutation Testing


Although peripheral devices come out at 
a frantic pace and require fast releases 
of drivers, little progress has been made 
to improve the development of 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 
to overcome these problems. After a thorough 
domain analysis, we define a language, named 
DEVIL, dedicated to defining the basic communication 
with a device. DEVIL allows the programmer 
to easily map a device documentation into 
a device description. This description formally specifies 
the access mechanisms, the type and layout 
of data, as well as behavioral properties 
involved in operating the device. Once compiled, 
a DEVIL description implements an interface which 
models an idealized device and abstracts the 
hardware complexity. 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 discovers bugs early in the development 
process. To assess our approach, we have 
shown that DEVIL is expressive enough to 
specify a large number of devices including 
Ethernet, video, disk, sound, LED display, interrupt, 
DMA and mouse controllers. To evaluate productivity 
improvement over traditional development in C, we 
report a first experiment based on mutation 
testing.