Joshua LeVasseur and Volkmar Uhlig

Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, September 19-22, 2004, Leuven, Belgium

Abstract:

Device drivers account for the majority of an operating system's code base, and reuse of the existing driver infrastructure is a pragmatic requirement of any new OS project. New operating systems should benefit from the existing device driver code base without demanding legacy support from the kernel.

Instead of trying to directly integrate existing device drivers we propose a more radical approach. We run the unmodified device driver, with its complete original OS, isolated in a virtual machine. Our flexible approach, requiring only minimal support infrastructure, allows us to run any existing device driver, independently of the OS or driver vendor.

BibTex:

@InProceedings{LeVasseur04Sledgehammer,
    author = {Joshua LeVasseur and Volkmar Uhlig},
    title = {A Sledgehammer Approach to Reuse of Legacy Device Drivers},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop},
    address = {Leuven, Belgium},
    month = sep,
    year = 2004,
    pages = {131--136},
    affiliation = {University of Karlsruhe, Germany}
}