Simulation of Set-top box Components on an X86 Architecture by Implementing a Hardware Abstraction Layer

Abstract: The KreaTV Application Development Kit (ADK) product of Motorola enables application developers to create high level applications and browser plugins for the IPSTB system. As a result, customers will reduce development time, cost and supplier dependency. The main goal of this thesis was to port this platform to a standard Linux PC to make it easy to trace the bugs and debug the code. This work has been done by implementing a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for Linux Operating System. HAL encapsulates the hardware dependent code and HAL APIs provide an abstraction of underlying architecture to the operating system and to application software. So, the embedded platform can be emulated on a standard Linux PC by implementing a HAL for it. We have successfully built the basic building blocks of HAL with some performance degradation. We are able to start up the application platform, use graphics mixing features and play a video via filtering the data from the transport stream and decoding it. But there is still a lot of work to do to build the whole HAL for all the platform to be run smoothly as they do on a set-top box hardware.