A Comparative Study of the Linux and Windows Device Driver Architectures with a focus on IEEE1394 (high speed serial

bus) drivers
Melekam Tsegaye g98t4414@campus.ru.ac.za Supervisors Prof. Richard Foss, Bradley Klinkradt

Overview
The Linux and Windows driver architectures The Linux and Windows IEEE 1394 driver stacks Driver development on the two platforms Results of the study

Why the study was conducted ?

Microsoft Windows and Linux

Two of the most popular operating systems No previous comparisons of their driver architectures done by other researchers
Popular bus offering high data transfer rates Active research area for the CS departments Audio Engineering Group

IEEE 1394 (firewire)

IEEE 1394
Data Transfer rates of 100, 200 and 400 Mbps Isochronous mode of transfer

Guaranteed bandwidth (80%) Guaranteed packet delivery (20% or more)

Asynchronous mode of transfer

Fully plug n play

IEEE 1394 Consumer Products

Device Drivers
A driver is a piece of software that extends a kernels functionality Drivers enable applications (through the kernel)

to transfer data to and from a device to control the a device to allow modification of its attributes

Composed of a set of routines that a kernel calls at appropriate times e.g. read/write

Typical driver routines

A driver would implement

Initialisation Cleanup Open Read Write I/O Control (ioctl) Close

The Windows driver architecture

Standard model

The Windows Driver Model (WDM)

bus, functional & filter drivers

PnP & Power management Communication

I/O request packets (IRPs)

The Linux driver architecture

No standard driver model

Drivers are modules No PnP & Power management message dispatching Communication through direct function calls

Side by side comparison of the two driver architectures Linux Windows

IEEE 1394 driver stacks

The Windows IEEE 1394 stack

closed source maintained by Microsoft stable

open source maintained by the Linux 1394 community (private individuals) tagged experimental

The Linux IEEE 1394 stack

The Windows IEEE 1394 stack

Host controller Bus driver Client drivers Communication

I/O request block (IRB)

The Linux IEEE 1394 stack

Host controller Bus drivers Client drivers Communication

direct function calls

Direct driver possible

Side by side comparison of the two IEEE 1394 stacks

Windows Linux

The Windows IEEE 1394 implementation

The Linux IEEE 1394 implementation

What operations should IEEE 1394 client drivers provide ?

Asynchronous Operations

Read Write Lock Listen Register Asynchronous Listening Deregister Asynchronous Listening
Listen Talk Asynchronous streaming

Isochronous operations

What operations should IEEE 1394 client drivers provide ? (Continued)

Bus reset handling

Register Bus Reset Handler Generate Soft Bus Reset

Obtain Bus Information (e.g. node count) Local configuration ROM manipulation Network troubleshooting

Pinging of nodes

Device Driver Development Environments

Issues to be considered when creating drivers

Memory management

The kernel provides memory allocation/deallocation routines Has two pools of memory (swappable, nonswappable)
The kernel provides implementations for queues, lists, stacks Synchronisation with spin locks, mutexes, semaphores, signal objects

Data structures

Issues to be considered when creating drivers (Continued)

Drivers routines

must be re-entrant i.e. should be executable by multiple threads with no problems avoid recursion
use HAL routines provided by the kernel to access hardware

Hardware Abstraction Layer

Map of software produced during this study

Windows raw1394 driver

Linux raw1394-2 driver

Linux Ieee1394diag

Driver Tests
Tests were run to determine

highest data transfer rates that can be achieved by each of the IEEE 1394 drivers how close these came to the theoretical maximum of 50MB/s
the duration of data transfers the amount of data transferred the data transfer rate in MB/s

Bus analyser used to measure

Calculated

Test results
Isochronous mode

Windows raw1394
8.9 MB/s packet size 1024 bytes

Linux raw1394
4.5 MB/s packet size 512 bytes

Isochronous mode (buffered)

Linux raw1394-2
8.9 MB/s packet size 1024 bytes

Windows raw1394
17.7 MB/s packet size 2048 bytes

Test results (continued)

Drivers from both Linux and Windows do not transfer data at a rate close to the theoretical

50MB/s They achieve almost half that

due to the PCI bus bottleneck (theoretical 132MB/s)

In practice have that available shared by all I/O devices attached to the PCI bus The PCI bus has latency problems

driver implementation may not be efficient

Conclusion
A comparison of the Windows and Linux driver architectures has shown that

Drivers for the two platform have similar components

composed of routines for performing

I/O and device control

drivers are modules which are loadable at runtime

Windows has a formally defined driver model, Linux does not. PnP and power management support integrated in the Windows architecture, not so in Linux

Conclusion (continued)
A comparison of the Windows and Linux IEEE 1394 stacks has shown that

Their IEEE 1394 driver stacks are broken up into similar layers
host controller, bus and client driver layers

Each stack provides the standard IEEE 1394 operations (both asynchronous and isochronous)

The Linux IEEE 1394 stack is open source while the Windows stack is proprietary

Easier to create IEEE 1394 drivers for Linux than Windows since all source code is available

Future work
IEEE 1394.1 bridge awareness IEEE 1394.1

allows extending the no. of nodes to 64K instead of the current 63 still in draft phase

The Windows and Linux IEEE 1394 driver developers did not take into account IEEE1394.1 bridging in their design This study identified bridge awareness requirements

implementation possible for the Linux 1394 stack not for the Windows 1394 stack (closed source)

Full IEEE 1394.1 implementation and testing not done during this study

no IEEE 1394.1 bridging hardware available the standard may change

Questions ?