The Design And Application Of PCI Device Driver

At present, the whole world is entering the information age. Personal computer systems with x86 processors and embedded systems with ARM processors are main platforms of information technology. They both use PCI bus to connect peripheral devices. The PCI bus is the most widely used and the most universal bus standard currently. These two systems have two major operating systems, including Windows operating system which is in the dominant position of desktop PCs and Linux operating system which is in increasingly widespread use of embedded field. To ensure operating system's stability, security and robustness, applications can only access peripheral equipment by device drivers. Device drivers that occupy an important position in a system provide methods to the applications which use them to communicate with peripheral devices. PCI device driver is widely used and is very practical and versatile in the both operating systems.This paper is based on blood analyzer and multi-DSP message-based VXI modules projects for the design background. I firstly study the PCI bus and its configuration and introduce the basis of the driver design. Following that the design of PCI device driver under Windows and Linux environment is particular described. The corresponding drivers are implemented. Finally, the device driver architectures of the two operating systems are compared. The Facade design pattern is introduced to the design of the driver which is encapsulated into a dll. Consequently, the driver layer and the application layer coding are independent. It accords with high cohesion and low coupling principles of software engineering. If the hardware platforms have to be upgraded in the future, only driver layer should be modified without having to recompile the entire system, vice versa.This paper presents the key technology and mechanism related to the systems for developing PCI device drivers. It can be used for similar projects with great efficiency and speed.