Self-stabilizing device drivers
ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)
Self-stabilizing device drivers
SSS'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Stabilization, safety, and security of distributed systems
Evaluation of the device driver availability in dawning4000a
GPC'06 Proceedings of the First international conference on Advances in Grid and Pervasive Computing
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Despite decades of research in fault tolerance, commodity operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, continue to crash. In this dissertation, I describe a new reliability subsystem for operating systems that prevents the most common cause of crashes, device driver failures, without requiring changes to drivers themselves. To date, the subsystem has been used in Linux to prevent system crashes in the presence of driver failures, recover failed drivers transparently to the OS and applications, and update drivers "on the fly" without requiring a system reboot after installation. Measurements show that the system is extremely effective at protecting the OS from driver failures, while imposing little runtime overhead.