Design And Optimization Of Device Driver Environment For Microkernel System

Unlike early monolithic kernel in Microkernel system, such as L4, only the mechanisms of address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication are remain supported. Nowadays, microkernel system has been widely used in research and development areas; however, the device driver module in microkernel system is rarely developed. Since device driver module for microkernel system is running under user space, the kerenl and other modules in user space are isolated. Due to the incompatibility and poor portability between microkernel system's device drivers, it is in weak security and lack of efficiency during interacting between device driver and other modules. Based on this circumstance and combined with current existing research results, this paper proposes a common and reusable device driver environment for microkernel system, and improves the security by adding safe loading and daemon thread. The design of inter-process communication also improves the system operating efficiency. The study has certain reference value.Based on the design and optimization for device driver environment, the implantation to MicroALSA architecture is accomplished in the L4 system Fiasco kernel. The device driver environment extends MicroALSA's scalability. The module of DLoader ensures the security. The testing result shows that, MicroALSA architecture gains higher security than ALSA at the expense of 2-7% lost in performance.In summary, novel design and optimization for microkernel's device driver environment is presented and an implementation to MicroALSA architecture is developed in this work which can provide reference to build microkernel system device driver environment in the future.