3/2008 : Hardware Objects for Java

RR Number

3/2008

Conference

11th IEEE International Symposium on Object/component/service-oriented Real-time distributed Computing (ISORC 2008)

Author(s)

Martin Schoeberl, Christian Thalinger, Stephan Korsholm, Anders P. Ravn

Abstract

Java, as a safe and platform independent language, avoids access to low-level I/O devices or direct memory access. In standard Java, low-level I/O it not a concern; it is handled by the operating system. However, in the embedded domain resources are scarce and a Java virtual machine (JVM) without an underlying middleware is an attractive architecture. When running the JVM on emph{bare metal}, we need access to I/O devices from Java; therefore we investigate a safe and efficient mechanism to represent I/O devices as first class Java objects, where device registers are represented by object fields. Access to those registers is safe as Java's type system regulates the access. The access is also fast as it is directly performed by the bytecodes getfield and putfield. Hardware objects thus provide an object-oriented abstraction of low-level hardware devices. As a proof of concept, we have implemented hardware objects in three quite different JVMs: in the Java processor JOP, the JIT compiler CACAO, and in the interpreting embedded JVM SimpleRTJ.

Bibtex

@INPROCEEDINGS{jop:hwobj,
  author = {Martin Schoeberl and Stephan Korsholm and Christian Thalinger and
	Anders P. Ravn},
  title = {Hardware Objects for {Java}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Symposium on Object/component/service-oriented
	Real-time distributed Computing (ISORC 2008)},
  year = {2008},
  address = {Orlando, Florida, USA},
  month = {May},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
  url = {http://www.jopdesign.com/doc/hwobj.pdf}
}

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