Understanding Modern Device Drivers

Understanding Modern Device DriversAsim Kadav and Michael M. SwiftComputer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison{kadav, Drivers are the single largest contributor to operating-systemkernel code with over 5 million lines of code in the Linux kernel,and cause significant complexity, bugs and development costs. Re-cent years have seen a flurry of research aimed at improving the re-liability and simplifying the development of Drivers . However, littleis known about what constitutes this huge body of code beyond thesmall set of Drivers used for this paper, we study the source code of Linux Drivers to un-derstand what Drivers actually do, how current research applies tothem and what opportunities exist for future research.}

A device driver can be thought of a translator. Its input consists of high-level commands such as “retrieve block 123.” Its output consists of low-level, hardware-specific instructions that are used by the hardware controller, which interfaces the I/O device to the

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  Devices, Drivers, Device drivers

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