Serialdriver: improving the reliability of device drivers through serialization

Abstract

A great number of consumer electronic devices have emerged in recent years. To support these devices, many device drivers have been developed. These device drivers usually work in operating systems. Improper concurrency management causes lots of device driver bugs and the drivers' failures often lead to operating system crashes. Various approaches have been proposed to solve this problem, some of which use serialization to avoid the concurrency faults. However, these methods need to rewrite all the device drivers. This paper proposes SerialDriver, a new architecture to solve the concurrency faults of device drivers based on serialization. The proposed SerialDriver is composed of three components: an interface adapter, a message queue and a request processing thread. With the help of the interface adapter, SerialDriver gets rid of the need for reimplementing device drivers. In SerialDriver, requests from kernel threads to a device driver are placed in a message queue. The request processing thread of SerialDriver delivers these requests to the device driver sequentially. Extensive evaluation results show that SerialDriver serializes requests for a device driver successfully and the overhead incurred by SerialDriver is acceptable.