Microdrivers: a new architecture for device drivers

Authors:
Vinod Ganapathy;Arini Balakrishnan;Michael M. Swift;Somesh Jha
Affiliations:
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Venue:
HOTOS'07 Proceedings of the 11th USENIX workshop on Hot topics in operating systems
Year:
2007

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Abstract

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 driverswith 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.