Safe Device Driver Model Based on Kernel-mode JVM

Researches have shown that device drivers account for most of the OS kernel crashes. In this paper we proposed a safe device driver model for the Linux OS, aiming at gaining an improvement on its reliability. Within this model, we are able to write device drivers in the type-safe language of Java, rather than the traditional C. Our main work includes the design of kernel-mode JVM which is suitable for running device drivers and the programming model of Java device driver. During the evaluation, by manually injecting bugs and observing the running results, we can see that Java device driver can effectively prevent various bugs from damaging the kernel and thus improve the reliability of operating system, only at the price of some degradation on system performance, which helps to demonstrate the viability of our approach. Mention that although we based our research on Linux, Java device driver model can also be applied to other operating systems, as long as the device drivers are accessed through standardized interfaces.