Automatic device driver synthesis with termite

  • Authors:

  • Leonid Ryzhyk;Peter Chubb;Ihor Kuz;Etienne Le Sueur;Gernot Heiser

  • Affiliations:

  • NICTA, UNSW, Sydney, Australia;NICTA, UNSW, Sydney, Australia;NICTA, UNSW, Sydney, Australia;NICTA, UNSW, Sydney, Australia;NICTA, UNSW, Open Kernel Labs, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 22nd symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Faulty device drivers cause significant damage through down time and data loss. The problem can be mitigated by an improved driver development process that guarantees correctness by construction. We achieve this by synthesising drivers automatically from formal specifications of device interfaces, thus reducing the impact of human error on driver reliability and potentially cutting down on development costs. We present a concrete driver synthesis approach and tool called Termite. We discuss the methodology, the technical and practical limitations of driver synthesis, and provide an evaluation of non-trivial drivers for Linux, generated using our tool. We show that the performance of the generated drivers is on par with the equivalent manually developed drivers. Furthermore, we demonstrate that device specifications can be reused across different operating systems by generating a driver for FreeBSD from the same specification as used for Linux.