Understanding modern device drivers

12 years 8 days ago

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Device drivers are the single largest contributor to operating-system kernel code with over 5 million lines of code in the Linux kernel, and cause signiﬁcant complexity, bugs and development costs. Recent years have seen a ﬂurry of research aimed at improving the reliability and simplifying the development of drivers. However, little is known about what constitutes this huge body of code beyond the small set of drivers used for research. In this paper, we study the source code of Linux drivers to understand what drivers actually do, how current research applies to them and what opportunities exist for future research. We determine whether assumptions made by driver research, such as that all drivers belong to a class, are indeed true. We also analyze driver abstractions to determine whether drivers can beneﬁt from code re-organization or hardware trends. We develop a set of staticanalysis tools to analyze driver code across various axes. Broadly, our study looks at three aspects...

Asim Kadav, Michael M. Swift

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