Fault Isolation for Linux Device Drivers

In this paper, we propose a fault isolation system for device drivers of the Linux operating system. High availability systems impose stringent requirements upon Linux operating system. Especially device drivers can be a major source of operating system instability and many times contribute to system degradation and outages. The proposed fault isolation system identifies the occurrence of the memory-related faults in device driver and isolates it from the kernel. By operating at the early stage of the page fault handler in Linux kernel, the system detects which module causes fault and isolates it transparently from the remaining part of the kernel. By experiments, we show that the proposed system efficiently detects faults incurred by device driver, isolates the device driver and the process which accessed the driver module from the kernel.