Nios II Classic Software Developer’s Handbook

ID 683282
Date 5/14/2015
Public
Document Table of Contents

7. Developing Device Drivers for the Hardware Abstraction Layer

Embedded systems typically have application-specific hardware features that require custom device drivers. This chapter describes how to develop device drivers and integrate them with the hardware abstraction layer (HAL).

This chapter also describes how to develop software packages for use with HAL board support packages (BSPs). The process of integrating a software package with the HAL is nearly identical with the process for integrating a device driver.

Confine direct interaction with the hardware to device driver code. In general, the best practice is to keep most of your program code free of low-level access to the hardware. Wherever possible, use the high-level HAL application program interface (API) functions to access hardware. This makes your code more consistent and more portable to other Nios® II systems that might have different hardware configurations.

When you create a new driver, you can integrate the driver with the HAL framework at one of the following two levels:

  • Integration in the HAL API
  • Peripheral-specific API
Note: As an alternative to creating a driver, you can compile the device-specific code as a user library, and link it with the application. This approach is workable if the device-specific code is independent of the BSP, and does not require any of the extra services offered by the BSP, such as the ability to add definitions to the system.h file.