Program slicing across the hardware-software boundary for embedded systems

The source code analysis technique of graph-based program slicing is extended to model interactions across the hardware-software boundary in the context of embedded systems. Specifically, this work proposes a set of inter-process dependences to model software interacting with hardware an asynchronous concurrency representation of dependences present in embedded systems an algorithm to compute context-sensitive slices that can transitively follow dependences from software, through hardware, and back to software. A prototype tool applies the proposed worklist algorithm to several test cases. Additionally, a detailed, step-by-step example demonstrates its operation on a device driver interacting with hardware.