Run-time Updating of Network Device Drivers
Hiroyuki K. M. TANAKA, Yoshinari Nomura, Hideo Taniguchi · 2009
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.