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Summary: Recovering Device Drivers
Michael M. Swift, Muthukaruppan Annamalai, Brian N. Bershad, and Henry M. Levy
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195 USA
{mikesw,muthu,bershad,levy}@cs.washington.edu
Abstract
This paper presents a new mechanism that enables applications
to run correctly when device drivers fail. Because device drivers
are the principal failing component in most systems, reducing
driver-induced failures greatly improves overall reliability. Ear-
lier work has shown that an operating system can survive driver
failures [33], but the applications that depend on them cannot.
Thus, while operating system reliability was greatly improved,
application reliability generally was not.
To remedy this situation, we introduce a new operating sys-
tem mechanism called a shadow driver. A shadow driver mon-
itors device drivers and transparently recovers from driver fail-
ures. Moreover, it assumes the role of the failed driver during
recovery. In this way, applications using the failed driver, as
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