This is done in preparation for the implementation of the new Petrel
protocol, which shares the low level communication with the existing
Predator protocol.
Currently, each backend has it's own function to verify whether the
object vtable pointer is the expected one. All these functions can be
removed in favor of a single isintance function in the base class,
which takes the expected vtable pointer as a parameter.
Functions which are called through the vtable, don't need to verify the
vtable pointer, and those checks are removed.
The term "backend" can be confusing because it can refer to both the
virtual function table and the device/parser backends. The use of the
term "vtable" avoids this.
The Petrel is slightly different from the Predator because the device
reorders the internal ringbuffer before sending the data. The most
recent dive is always the first one, and there is no need to search for
it, like we have to do for the Predator.
