Reliable device drivers require well-defined protocols

Authors:
Leonid Ryzhyk;Timothy Bourke;Ihor Kuz
Affiliations:
NICTA and The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;NICTA and The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;NICTA and The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Venue:
HotDep'07 Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on on Hot Topics in System Dependability
Year:
2007

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Abstract

Current operating systems lack well-defined protocols for interaction with device drivers. We argue that this hinders the development of reliable drivers and thereby undermines overall system stability. We present an approach to specify driver protocols using a formalism based on state machines. We show that it can simplify device programming, facilitate static analysis of drivers against protocol specifications, and enable detection of incorrect behaviours at runtime.