The design and implementation of microdrivers

Device drivers commonly execute in the kernel to achieve high performance and easy access to kernel services. However, this comes at the price of decreased reliability and increased programming difficulty. Driver programmers are unable to use user-mode development tools and must instead use cumbersome kernel tools. Faults in kernel drivers can cause the entire operating system to crash. Usermode drivers have long been seen as a solution to this problem, but suffer from either poor performance or new interfaces that require a rewrite of existing drivers. This paper introduces the Microdrivers architecture that achieves high performance and compatibility by leaving critical path code in the kernel and moving the rest of the driver code to a user-mode process. This allows data-handling operations critical to I/O performance to run at full speed, while management operations such as initialization and configuration run at reduced speed in userlevel. To achieve compatibility, we present Dri...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Vinod Ganapathy, Matthew J. Renzelmann, Arini Balakrishnan, Michael M. Swift, Somesh Jha
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2008, Cumbersome Kernel Tools, Device Drivers, Kernel Drivers, Programming Languages