Automated development tools for linux USB drivers

Abstract

USB devices are widely used in consumer electronics. Writing device drivers has always been a tedious and error-prone job. This paper presents assisting tools for developing USB drivers under Linux OS. The tool kit includes (1) a generic-skeleton generator that can automatically generate generic USB driver code skeleton according to user-specified configuration, (2) a flattened-HID-driver generator that can merge stacked HID drivers to a monolithic driver and prune C codes to reduce size and response time for embedded applications, and (3) an ECP (Extended C Preprocessor) compiler that provides type-checking capability for low-level I/O operation and makes the driver code more readable.