SIDE: Isolated and efficient execution of unmodified device drivers

Abstract

Buggy device drivers are a major threat to the reliability of their host operating system. There have been myriad attempts to protect the kernel, but most of them either required driver modifications or incur substantial performance overhead. This paper describes an isolated device driver execution system called SIDE (Streamlined Isolated Driver Execution), which focuses specifically on unmodified device drivers and strives to avoid changing the existing kernel code as much as possible. SIDE exploits virtual memory hardware to set up a device driver execution environment that is compatible with existing device drivers and yet is fully isolated from the kernel. SIDE is able to run an unmodified device driver for a Gigabit Ethernet NIC and the latency and throughput penalty is kept under 1% when augmented with a set of performance optimizations designed to reduce the number of protection domain crossings between an isolated device driver and the kernel.