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A Comparison of the Linux and Windows Device Driver Architectures

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While searching for something irrelevant, I found a very interesting paper, called "A Comparison of the Linux and Windows Device Driver Architectures" by Melekam Tsegaye and Richard Foss. It was published at the ACM Operating Systems Review, Volume 38, Number 2, 2004. You can find a link to the paper here.

The paper compares the device driver architectures between linux and windows. It starts by providing an extensive analysis to both architectures and then presenting a detailed comparison. The paper covers the 2.4 linux kernel and the Windows Driver Model (WDM) from Windows XP, so it can be considered that it is quite up-to-date (at least from the Windows perspective). Also, in the same page, you'll find Melekam Tsegaye's MSc Thesis, which covers the same contents as the paper, but it also presents the design and the implementation of an IEEE-1394 driver for both windows and linux. Both drivers can be found here, while the presentation of the thesis can be found here.

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