Microdrivers: A New Architecture for Device Drivers

Commodity operating systems achieve good performance by running device drivers in-kernel. Unfortunately, this architecture offers poor fault isolation. This paper introduces microdrivers, which reduce the amount of driver code running in the kernel by splitting driver functionality between a small kernel-mode component and a larger user-mode component. This paper presents the microdriver architecture and techniques to refactor existing device drivers into microdrivers, achieving most of the benefits of user-mode drivers with the performance of kernel-mode drivers. Experiments on a network driver show that 75% of its code can be removed from the kernel without affecting common-case performance.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: HOTOS
• Authors: Vinod Ganapathy, Arini Balakrishnan, Michael M. Swift, Somesh Jha
• Keywords: Device Drivers, HOTOS 2007, Larger User-mode Component, Operating System, Small Kernel-mode Component