Research On Microkernel Based Device Driver Framework

As electronic technology continues to evolve, a variety of new electronic products continue to emerge. With rich peripherals, the design of drivers becomes more and more complex. So the probability of defects in the code will also be growing. This trend has brought new challenges to the design and implementation of the device driver framework in the operating systems. In this paper, based on the current device driver and microkernel research, we proposed a new user-space device driver framework. We overcome the performance bottlenecks in accessing peripheral devices, and provide a reliable and efficient mechanism to ensure the communication between the applications and the driver services. The main contributions are as follows:●We proposed a new user-space device driver framework. In this framework, we run drivers as services in user-space in order to achieve a separation between the driver and the kernel. Isolation ensures that the defects in the drivers will not cause the kernel collapse. This framework provides a runtime environment for driver services. The services are loosely coupled so they can be updated dynamically.●We implemented a runtime environment for driver services. The runtime environment defines a standard interface for all kinds of drivers. We describe various types of driver interfaces in IDL language. We implemented a remote method invocation mechanism based on IPC of the microkernel.●We implemented a hardware abstraction layer. We provided an abstract hardware platform and a unified hardware interface by the use of the underlying microkernel APIs for the underlying hardware and peripherals to access and control. Hardware abstraction laver consists of three modules as follows: a memory management module system that controlled all the memory mappings; an I/O module that encapsulated port I/O and memory mapped I/O; an interrupt module that achieved handling interrupts in user-space.