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Developing and maintaining drivers is known to be one of the major challenges in creating a general-purpose, practically-useful operating system 1, 3. In the case of Linux, device drivers make up, by far, the largest part of the kernel source code, and many more drivers are available outside the standard kernel source tree. New drivers are needed all the time, to give access to the latest devices. To ease driver development, Linux provides a set of driver support libraries, each devoted to a particular bus or device type. These libraries encapsulate much of the complexity of interacting with the device and the Linux kernel, and impose a uniform structure on device-specific code within a given bus or device type.
Padioleau et al. (Sun,) studied this question.