Microdrivers: A new architecture for device drivers

Vinod Ganapathy; Arini Balakrishnan; Michael M. Swift; Somesh Jha

Microdrivers: A new architecture for device drivers

Vinod Ganapathy, Arini Balakrishnan, Michael M. Swift, Somesh Jha

School of Arts and Sciences, Computer Science

Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › peer-review

25 Scopus citations

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 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.

Original language	English (US)
State	Published - 2007
Event	11th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, HotOS 2007 - San Diego, United States Duration: May 7 2007 → May 9 2007

Conference

Conference	11th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, HotOS 2007
Country/Territory	United States
City	San Diego
Period	5/7/07 → 5/9/07

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

Computer Networks and Communications
Hardware and Architecture
Information Systems

Cite this

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title = "Microdrivers: A new architecture for device drivers",

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 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.",

author = "Vinod Ganapathy and Arini Balakrishnan and Swift, {Michael M.} and Somesh Jha",

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AU - Ganapathy, Vinod

AU - Balakrishnan, Arini

AU - Swift, Michael M.

AU - Jha, Somesh

PY - 2007

Y1 - 2007

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

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M3 - Paper

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Y2 - 7 May 2007 through 9 May 2007

ER -

Microdrivers: A new architecture for device drivers

Abstract

Conference

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

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