U2MDF: A Unified User-Mode Driver Framework

Commodity operating systems execute device drivers in the kernel to achieve good performance. Unfortunately, this scheme is a significant cause of system failures. A study at Stanford University found Linux drivers have 3 to 7 times bug frequency as the rest of the operating systems. User-mode driver has long been considered as a good solution to solve this problem, but it suffers from either poor performance or bad compatibility because of context switch between kernel-space and user-space as well as modifying the code of commodity operating systems or existing traditional drivers. This paper proposes a new architecture U2MDF-Unified User-Mode Driver Framework. U2MDF splits the traditional device driver into two parts: kernel-driver module and user-driver component. In experiment SystemTap and Netperf are used to evaluate U2MDF and experimental data shows U2MDF not only obtains good performance and compatibility but also provides a unified framework for user-mode device drivers´ development.