H. Liu, R.B. Piercey, J.E. McKisson, B. Maisler, Yishi Li, John McKisson, and J. Schuck (USA)
Software Engineering Application, Embedded System, Asynchronous Data Acquisition, Direct Memory Access
This paper introduces the KSBSDriver, an empirical solution to a new PCI-bridge device driver. The driver is used to operate a family of PCI-VME communication adapters [6] and provide intersystem data acquisition services to an instrumentation development environment, called Kmax [2]. It provides the first PCI-VME bridge device driver that supports both programmed I/O and DMA for MacOS-X. The native driver for MacOS-X offers ADC (Apple Developer Connection, [8]) community an efficient approach to conduct asynchronous communication between MacOS-X kernel and user space. Subtle technique problems about the virtual memory management of DMA and a novel solution are presented to address a challenging performance issue. Other software engineering issues such as portability, extendibility, and reusability are discussed. The empirical solution presented in this paper provides Unix device-driver developers a practical paradigm to write native libraries of COM (Component Object Model) standard that run under the Java environment.
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