AXI GPIO Driver Development and CPP Unit Testing

Abstract

In the current situation, the importance of the driver or device driver is very high in any FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) Board. And the main purpose of any driver is to provide an interface between the hardware configuration of the system and the operating system. It will work like a translator between them. In the FPGA board, several types of drivers are being used according to the requirement of the system or the product. GPIO driver stands for “General Purpose Input Output” driver. As the name stands the use of this driver is for general input outputs. There are mainly 3 types of GPIO drivers here. first is Linux based, the second is BareMetal and the third is RTOS based. My work is on the BareMetal base driver. The BareMetal drivers are simple to implement compared to Linux. In the BareMetal drivers we can directly run the program on the hardware board but in the Linux based it is not the same. Same as the driver the importance of the library or the interface which provides a platform to connect user applications with different hardware IPIs is also the same. For that XilMailbox library provides this interface to the user applications. It will act as a bridge. In the software development cycle, the importance of Unit Testing is very high. A Unit Test is a type of software test in which individual units or software components are tested. Here, I have written unit test cases for the source files of the AXI GPIO driver and the XilMailbox library and tested them on the host machine.