User-level device drivers: Achieved performance
Authors
NICTA, Sydney, Australia
UNSW, Australia
Abstract
Running device drivers as unprivileged user-level code, encapsulated into their own process, has often been proposed as a technique for increasing system robustness. However, in the past, systems based on user-level drivers have generally exhibited poor I/O performance. Consequently, user-level device drivers have never caught on to any significant degree.
In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to build systems which employ user-level device drivers, without significant performance degradation, even for high-bandwidth devices such as Gigabit Ethernet.
BibTeX Entry
@article{Leslie_CFGGMPSEH_05, journal = {Journal of Computer Science and Technology}, author = {Ben Leslie and Peter Chubb and Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale and Stefan G\"{o}tz and Charles Gray and Luke Macpherson and Daniel Potts and Yueting (Rita) Shen and Kevin Elphinstone and Gernot Heiser}, number = {5}, month = sep, volume = {20}, year = {2005}, title = {User-level Device Drivers: Achieved Performance}, pages = {654--664} }