Hardware abstraction

Hardware abstraction

Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that emulate some platform-specific details, giving programs direct access to the hardware resources.

They often allow programmers to write device-independent, high performance applications by avoiding standard Operating System calls to hardware. The process of abstracting pieces of hardware is often done from the perspective of a CPU. Each type of CPU has a specific instruction set architecture or ISA. The ISA represents the primitive operations of the machine that are available for use by assembly programmers and compiler writers. One of the main functions of a compiler is to allow a programmer to write an algorithm in a high-level language without having to care about CPU-specific instructions. Then it is the job of the compiler to generate a CPU-specific executable. The same type of abstraction is made in operating systems, but OS APIs now represent the primitive operations of the machine, rather than an ISA. This allows a programmer to use OS-level operations (i.e. task creation/deletion) in their programs while still remaining portable over a variety of different platforms.

See also: Hardware abstraction layer


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