Improving the reliability of commodity operating systems

Despite decades of research in extensible operating system technology, extensions such as device drivers remain a significant cause of system failures. In Windows XP, for example, drivers account for 85% of recently reported failures. This paper describes Nooks, a reliability subsystem that seeks to greatly enhance OS reliability by isolating the OS from driver failures. The Nooks approach is practical: rather than guaranteeing complete fault tolerance through a new (and incompatible) OS or driver architecture, our goal is to prevent the vast majority of driver-caused crashes with little or no change to existing driver and system code. To achieve this, Nooks isolates drivers within lightweight protection domains inside the kernel address space, where hardware and software prevent them from corrupting the kernel. Nooks also tracks a driver’s use of kernel resources to hasten automatic clean-up during recovery. To prove the viability of our approach, we implemented Nooks in the Linux ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Michael M. Swift, Brian N. Bershad, Henry M. Levy
• Keywords: Nooks Isolates Drivers, Nooks Offers, Operating System, Paper Describes Nooks, SOSP 2003