Virtualizing Drivers: User Space Drivers in Linux
Vitaly Wool
Monta Vista Russia
<vwool@ru.mvista.com>
There are two reasons for using dual-OS-single-core or dual-OS-dual-core approaches for Linux: real time responsiveness and GPL exposure of drivers. As the first has been solved by the Linux Real Time patch, this only leaves the second. User Space Drivers do what the name implies - most of the processing is done by the userspace daemon which interacts with "stub" kernel driver.

This talk will cover aspects of userspace drivers model like the "who does what" problem - how to split the driver functionality between the userspace daemon and the kernel "stub", the real-time characteristics of userspace drivers vs ones for the kernel drivers implementing the same functionality. The talk will also address problems as reliability and robustness of userspace drivers. The overall goal is to specify the areas of applicability of userspace drivers and perspectives of this approach.

Vitaly Wool, Lead Software Engineer at MontaVista Russia graduated in St. Petersburg State Univ. in 2002 as a Computer Science specialist, worked with such real-time OSes as VxWorks and RTEMS mostly for PowerPC platforms for Tercom state Enterprise.

Moved to Moscow, Russia, in 2003 where he started to work mostly on Linux for different platforms and architectures. Joined MontaVista Russia in 2004. Interested in consumer electronic optimizations for Linux, ARM Linux development in general, takes part in Linux MTD/JFFS2 and XIP development.


Last modified: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:14:06 +0100