Improving reliability is one of the greatest challenges for commodity operating systems. System failures are commonplace and costly across all domains: in the home, in the server room, and in embedded systems, where the existence of the OS itself is invisible. At the low end, failures lead to user frustration and lost sales. At the high end, an hour of downtime from a system failure can result in losses in the millions.
Most of these system failures are caused by the operating system’s device drivers. Failed driver access cause 85% of Windows XP crashes, while Linux drivers have seven times the bug rate of other kernel code . A failed driver typically causes the application, the OS kernel, or both to crash or stop functioning as expected. Hence, preventing driver-induced failures improves overall system reliability.
Earlier failure-isolation systems within the kernel were designed to prevent driver failures from corrupting the kernel itself . In these systems, the kernel unloads a failed driver and then restarts it from a safe initial state. While isolation techniques can reduce the frequency of system crashes, applications using the failed driver can still crash. These failures occur because the driver loses application state when it restarts, causing applications to receive erroneous results. Most applications are unprepared to cope with this. Rather, they reflect the conventional failure model: drivers and the operating system either fail together or not at all. Driveraccess at driveraccess.com provides solutions for this failure.
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