OS Kernel, drivers & BSPs development

The 21st century brings a dramatic increase in the evolution of technology and, thus, new challenges for OEM vendors, industrial and consumer equipment manufacturers, and software product vendors as they face the tasks that require complex kernel-level development. With more than 18 years of software engineering experience and extensive knowledge and expertise in Linux and Windows internals, Interface Ltd. has repeatedly helped its clients worldwide to address these challenges successfully. Interface Ltd. also frequently deals with standalone driver and Board Support Packages (BSPs) development projects for both OS and board vendors. Interface Ltd. has developed diversified expertise with multiple types of peripherals, processor architectures, as well as a wide variety of operating systems. This accumulated experience and knowledge enable Interface Ltd. to create any driver for virtually any OS/device combination.

The two main expertise areas in this domain are described in the following sections below:

• Device drivers and BSPs
• OS kernel internals: Windows, Linux, UNIX, RTOS

Interface Ltd. is competent in the following Operating Systems

• Windows:
          Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista;
          Windows XP Embedded, Windows CE/Mobile, Windows NT 4.0 Embedded.
  
• UNIX and Linux:
          Linux, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, SunOS, SCO UnixWare, Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX, SCO OpenServer.
  
• Real-time and embedded:
          pSOS, VxWorks, OSE, QNX, LynxOS.
  
• Embedded Linux- Hard Hat Linux, ucLinux (microLinux), proprietary distributions...

Interface Ltd. has experience dealing with the following processor architectures:

• PICMG standards:
          CompactPCI, AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA, AdvancedMC.
  
• PCI, VME, transparent and non-transparent bridges;
• FibreChannel;
• IPMI;
• SCSI, iSCSI;
• PLX Gigabridge;
• Ethernet;
• StarFabric, PCI Express, PCI Express AS;
• T1/E1;
• Computer Telephony Hardware;
• ATM.

Device Drivers and BSPs

The development of stable, reliable, and maintainable device drivers requires specialized knowledge, experience, and tools. Interface Ltd. has acquired considerable expertise backed by 18+ years of working on a large number of projects involving development, maintenance and testing of a variety of device drivers. The experience gained by Interface Ltd. enables the development of a device driver for virtually any type of I/O or DMA devices in a process-oriented, predictable manner. Some examples of driver development projects for specific devices include:

• I/O Co-processor control and management system, including a set of drivers and associated APIs for Digital UNIX;
• Hot Swap drivers for NMS AG family boards (CPCI form factor);
• Network adapter (NDIS) drivers for Windows;
• StarFabric Bus Driver;
• Network interface card drivers for LynxOS and Linux;
• FibreChannel Device Drivers Suite, and many other drivers for LynxOS real-time OS.

Interface Ltd. deals with board support packages (BSPs) projects so frequently that at any given time there are multiple BSP projects being performed by Interface Ltd. engineers. Animating a board is a key purpose of any BSP project. A board may be equipped with both standard and unique hardware components, so a Board Support Package is a customization of an OS that provides software applications with methods to properly use the board components. Typically, the scope of a BSP development project includes:

• a set of device drivers for additional hardware components (on-board and/or peripheral devices) supported by the BSB-Ethernet, hard disk, keyboard and video adapter, etc);
• a board-specific core OS (initialization and management of hardware components that are crucial for OS operation-bridges, timers, interrupt controller, etc);
• a set of interfaces and associated development tools for building the custom software on top of the BSP.

OS Kernel Internals: Windows, Linux, UNIX, RTOS