| Affiliation: | (1) National ICT Australia and School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, Australia;(2) Wilhelm-Schickard-Institute for Computer Science, University of Tübingen, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany |
| Abstract: | Running device drivers as unprivileged user-level code, encapsulated into their own process, has often been proposed as a technique for increasing system robustness. However, in the past, systems based on user-level drivers have generally exhibited poor I/O performance. Consequently, user-level device drivers have never caught on to any significant degree. In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to build systems which employ user-level device drivers, without significant performance degradation, even for high-bandwidth devices such as Gigabit Ethernet. |
