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OSDI '04 — Abstract
Pp. 1–16 of the Proceedings
Awarded Best Paper!
Recovering Device Drivers
Michael M. Swift, Muthukaruppan Annamalai, Brian N. Bershad, and Henry M. Levy, University of Washington
Abstract
This paper presents a new mechanism that enables applications
to run correctly when device drivers fail. Because
device drivers are the principal failing component in most systems,
reducing driver-induced failures greatly improves overall reliability.
Earlier work has shown that an operating system can survive driver
failures [33], but the applications that depend on them cannot.
Thus, while operating system reliability was greatly improved,
application reliability generally was not.
To remedy this situation, we introduce a new operating system
mechanism called a shadow driver. A shadow driver monitors
device drivers and transparently recovers from driver failures.
Moreover, it assumes the role of the failed driver during recovery.
In this way, applications using the failed driver, as well as
the kernel itself, continue to function as expected.
We implemented shadow drivers for the Linux operating system and
tested them on over a dozen device drivers. Our results show that
applications and the OS can indeed survive the failure of a variety of
device drivers. Moreover, shadow drivers impose minimal performance
overhead. Lastly, they can be introduced with only modest changes to
the OS kernel and with no changes at all to existing device drivers.
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