Run-time Updating of Network Device Drivers

Abstract

Recent operating systems are capable of using dynamic loadable module functions to update the device driver programs without shutting down the entire system. However, even if a system continues to operate, some services provided by the device driver will be temporarily unavailable during the run-time update. To reduce the period during which the services are unavailable, we propose a new method for run-time updating of device drivers; this method uses context migration from an old driver to an updated one. In this study, we describe the implementation of a network-device driver using our method. In addition, we have shown some advantages of our method by performing a trial on the FreeBSD operating system.