Comparative Study on Fuchsia and Linux Device Driver Architecture

Abstract

In this paper, we study device driver architectures on two different operating systems, Fuchsia and Linux. Fuchsia is a relatively new operating system developed by Google and it is based on a microkernel named Zircon, while Linux-based operating system is based on a monolithic kernel. This paper examines technical details of device driver on Fuchsia and Linux operating systems with the focus on different kernel designs. We also quantitatively evaluate the performance of device drivers on both operating systems by measuring I/O throughput in a real device.