Nios II Classic Software Developer’s Handbook

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

5.2.4.3. Benefits to Device Driver Developers

Each device model defines a set of driver functions necessary to manipulate the particular class of device. If you are writing drivers for a new peripheral, you need only provide this set of driver functions. As a result, your driver development task is predefined and well documented. In addition, you can use existing HAL functions and applications to access the device, which saves software development effort. The HAL calls driver functions to access hardware. Application programmers call the ANSI C or HAL API to access hardware, rather than calling your driver routines directly. Therefore, the usage of your driver is already documented as part of the HAL API.