UNSW Computer Science and Engineering Technical Report no. UNSW-CSE-TR-0303
(9 pages: file 0303.pdf)

Title: Towards Unstrusted Device Drivers

Author:  Ben Leslie, Gernot Heiser
         School of Computer Science and Engineering 
         University of New South Wales
         Sydney 2052 Australia
         E-mail: {benjl, gernot}@cse.unsw.edu.au

Abstract:

Device drivers are well known to be one of the prime sources of
unreliability in today's computer systems. We argue that this need not
be, as drivers can be run as user-level tasks, allowing them to be
encapsulated by hardware protection. In contrast to prior work on
user-level drivers, we show that on present hardware it is possible to
prevent DMA from undermining this encapsulation. We show that this can
be done without unreasonably impacting driver performance.


https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~reports/papers/0303.pdf