A sledgehammer approach to reuse of legacy device drivers

Abstract

Device drivers account for the majority of an operating system's code base, and reuse of the existing driver infrastructure is a pragmatic requirement of any new OS project. New operating systems should benefit from the existing device driver code base without demanding legacy support from the kernel.Instead of trying to directly integrate existing device drivers we propose a more radical approach. We run the unmodified device driver, with its complete original OS, isolated in a virtual machine. Our flexible approach, requiring only minimal support infrastructure, allows us to run any existing device driver, independently of the OS or driver vendor.