Linux is an open-source operating system, which has increased in its popularity and size since its birth. Various studies have been conducted in literature on the evolution of the Linux kernel, which have shown that there are considerable maintenance problems arising out of the coupling issues in the Linux kernel and this may hamper the evolution of the kernel in future. We propose an object-oriented (OO) wrapper-based approach to Linux kernel to provide OO abstractions to external modules. As the major growth of the size of the Linux kernel is in device drivers, our approach provides substantial benefits in terms of developing the device drivers in C + +, although the kernel is in C. Providing reusability and extensibility features to device drivers improves the maintainability of the kernel. The OO wrappers provide several benefits to module developers in terms of understandability, development ease, support for OO modules, etc. The design and implementation of C++ wrappers for Linux kernel and the performance of a device driver re-engineered in C++ are presented in this paper. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.