REUSE LINUX DEVICE DRIVERS IN EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Abstract

Device driver is one component that is usually ignored by research community in operating systems. Their design mechanisms, accessing semantics, operating behaviors and runtime performance are curcial to operating system architecture and total system performance. In this paper, an I/O package to reuse Linus device drivers in embedded system is introduced. Via this package, the whole Linux device-driver source tree can be reused without any modifications. The motivations why to do this work and the detailed design and implementation issues are addressed. This I/O package was also quantitativaly evaluated. The empirical results show that the incorporated drivers' performance is comparable with those operated under Linux, and those native drivers under Vega kernel.