The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 02, 2010
Filed:
Apr. 06, 2006
Michael Swift, Madison, WI (US);
Brian Bershad, Seattle, WA (US);
Hank Levy, Seattle, WA (US);
University of Washington, Seattle, WA (US);
Abstract
A solution to the problem of maintaining application integrity when device drivers fail. This solution employs a new mechanism, the shadow driver, which is an operating system (OS) kernel agent that monitors communication between the OS kernel and the device driver it 'shadows.' When a device driver error occurs, the shadow driver acts in place of the failed device driver, intercepting and responding to calls from the OS kernel and the device driver during cleanup, unloading, reloading, and re-initialization of the failed device driver. Applications and the OS kernel are thus isolated from the failure. An initial embodiment was developed for use with the Linux™ OS and was tested with a dozen device drivers. Results demonstrate that shadow drivers successfully mask device driver failures from applications, impose minimal performance overhead, require no changes to existing applications and device drivers, and can be implemented with relatively little code.