A Domain-Specic Language for Device Drivers

Device drivers are dicult to write and error-prone. They are usually written in low-level languages with minimal type safety and little support for device driver semantics. As a result, they have become a major source of instability in operating system code. This paper presents NDL, a type-safe, platform-independent Network Device Language. NDL pro-vides high-level abstractions of device resources and constructs tailored for the expression of common de-vice driver operations. We show that NDL allows for the coding of a robust and ecient driver with a code size reduction of approximately 45%.