research-article

The design and implementation of microdrivers

Authors:

Vinod Ganapathy,

Matthew J. Renzelmann,

Arini Balakrishnan,

Michael M. Swift,

Somesh JhaAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 42, Issue 2

Pages 168 - 178

https://doi.org/10.1145/1353535.1346303

Published: 01 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Device drivers commonly execute in the kernel to achieve high performance and easy access to kernel services. However, this comes at the price of decreased reliability and increased programming difficulty. Driver programmers are unable to use user-mode development tools and must instead use cumbersome kernel tools. Faults in kernel drivers can cause the entire operating system to crash. User-mode drivers have long been seen as a solution to this problem, but suffer from either poor performance or new interfaces that require a rewrite of existing drivers.

This paper introduces the Microdrivers architecture that achieves high performance and compatibility by leaving critical path code in the kernel and moving the rest of the driver code to a user-mode process. This allows data-handling operations critical to I/O performance to run at full speed, while management operations such as initialization and configuration run at reduced speed in user-level. To achieve compatibility, we present DriverSlicer, a tool that splits existing kernel drivers into a kernel-level component and a user-level component using a small number of programmer annotations. Experiments show that as much as 65% of driver code can be removed from the kernel without affecting common-case performance, and that only 1-6 percent of the code requires annotations.

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Index Terms

The design and implementation of microdrivers
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Reliability
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
    2. Extra-functional properties
      1. Software reliability

Recommendations

The design and implementation of microdrivers
ASPLOS '08

Device drivers commonly execute in the kernel to achieve high performance and easy access to kernel services. However, this comes at the price of decreased reliability and increased programming difficulty. Driver programmers are unable to use user-mode ...
The design and implementation of microdrivers
ASPLOS XIII: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems

Device drivers commonly execute in the kernel to achieve high performance and easy access to kernel services. However, this comes at the price of decreased reliability and increased programming difficulty. Driver programmers are unable to use user-mode ...
The design and implementation of microdrivers
ASPLOS '08

Device drivers commonly execute in the kernel to achieve high performance and easy access to kernel services. However, this comes at the price of decreased reliability and increased programming difficulty. Driver programmers are unable to use user-mode ...

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 42, Issue 2

ASPLOS '08

March 2008

339 pages

ISSN:0163-5980

DOI:10.1145/1353535

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS XIII: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
March 2008
352 pages
ISBN:9781595939586
DOI:10.1145/1346281
General Chair:
Susan Eggers
University of Washington, USA
,
Program Chair:
James Larus
Microsoft Research, USA

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 01 March 2008

Published in SIGOPS Volume 42, Issue 2

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3456727.3463768
Cotroneo DDe Simone LFucci FNatella R(2015)MoIOProceedings of the 2015 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE.2015.7381840(472-483)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ISSRE.2015.7381840
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2307636.2307669
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