Model-driven development of device tree software

Device Tree (DT) files, which include hardware information and configuration, are used during the compilation of operating systems for various embedded platforms. DTs provide description of physical devices and peripherals inside an embedded system hardware with node specifications. However, software developers mostly have difficulties in developing such applications due to text-based syntax of DT source files which has a different structure from the well-known general purpose programming languages. Furthermore, the developer needs to be familiar with the hardware which is specific for each different microprocessor to prepare such DT files. In order to eliminate these deficiencies and difficulties of current DT software development processes, a model-driven software development methodology in which automatic generation and configuration of DT software for different embedded system platforms is provided in this thesis. Also, a domain-specific modeling language, called DSML4DT, is developed with including all supporting visual modeling and automatic code generation tools for the application of the proposed methodology. An embedded system device is used for evaluation. The comparative evaluation results showed that DT software can automatically provide a significant amount of the required code using DSML4DT.