been doing alot of reading about the move into udi
and portable devices. hp looks like they are going to
move into this area with both feet. their ceo was on cnbc
and talked with a great deal of in enthusiasm about the
new products pending and the growth potential. some history and a link to white paper.
Portable Device Driver Development Reaches
Milestone Toward Becoming Industry Standard
Project UDI Readies UDI 0.90 Specification to Solve Industry-Wide
Problem, Reference Implementations to Be Released
INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM '99, Palm Springs, CA (February 24, 1999) - At the Intel Developer
Forum (IDF) today, members of Project UDI (Uniform Driver Interface) announced version 0.90 of the UDI
Specification, a major milestone in the ongoing effort to deliver a single, cross-platform device driver. This
specification will be freely available from sco.com in March 1999.
With this release, the UDI Specification is functionally complete and ready for broad public review. A
two-month review period will be held, after which the final 1.0 spec will be published by mid-1999. During
the review period, comments may be submitted through an online form at
sco.com. All interested parties are invited to participate.
Also today, Project UDI announced intentions by member companies to provide reference
implementations and sample drivers to accompany the upcoming 1.0 specification release. These
reference implementations include: a Linux reference port developed by Intel, a UnixWare 7 reference port
developed by SCO, and an HP-UX reference port developed by Hewlett-Packard, along with a sample
100Base-T NIC driver from Interphase Corporation and a SCSI driver from Adaptec. These reference ports
and sample drivers will assist other system vendors and IHVs to implement UDI-based products for their
customers.
Solving the Industry-wide Problem
Operating system vendors have resource limitations that do not allow them to write drivers to support the
growing number of hardware peripherals. The burden often falls on the IHV to write the driver, increasing
costs and slowing time-to-market. The UDI model solves this problem by allowing a single driver to
support multiple operating systems. UDI allows device drivers to be portable across both hardware
platforms and operating systems without changes to the driver source. This significantly lowers the cost
of driver development, speeds time-to-market of new devices, and allows manufacturers to allocate
development resource on improving device performance, features and functionality.
"Unifying UNIX at a lower level than application programming interfaces (APIs) has been a long-time goal
of many in the Unix industry," said Dan Kusnetzky, program director for International Data Corporation's
operating environments and serverware programs. "To be competitive, operating environment suppliers
have had to support many devices and device suppliers have had to support many operating
environments. These duplicated efforts cost suppliers precious resources and time. Project UDI appears
to be a strong move towards a solution."
About UDI and Project UDI
UDI isolates drivers from operating system policies, as well as platform and I/O bus dependencies. This
allows driver development to be totally independent of operating system development. In addition, the UDI
architecture insulates drivers from platform specifics such as byte-ordering, DMA implications,
multi-processing, interrupt implementations and I/O bus topologies. Project UDI is an open industry forum
whose contributors include Adaptec, Bit3, Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel, Interphase, Lockheed Martin, SCO
and Sun. Project UDI is open to all interested parties. See sco.com for more information.
Contributors to Project UDI
Compaq
"Compaq is excited about our involvement in Project UDI, and Compaq views Project UDI as an important
step toward providing a common driver interface standard for the industry," said Tim Yeaton, Vice
President and General Manager, Compaq's UNIX Software Division. "Compaq is pleased with the
progress of this significant effort, and looks forward to continuing our contributions to provide open
standards for our users."
Press Contact:
Dick Calandrella
Tel: (508) 467-2261
Email:dick.calandrella@compaq.com
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard is an active partner in Project UDI, highly involved in the development of the Uniform
Driver Interface. HP is developing prototype UDI drivers and driver services and is demonstrating the
effectiveness and portability of UDI. HP played a key role in the design of UDI technology and welcomes
Intel's involvement in this effort. HP will be a key participant in UDI-related activities at IDF.
HP supports the goals of Project UDI as an open industry forum, which brings together experts in driver
interface design, to cooperatively develop technology enabling driver operation across a wide variety of
platforms and environments, therefore reducing costs and time-to-market for the delivery of I/O solutions.
Press Contact:
Graham Smith
Hewlett-Packard
Tel: 408-447-2097
Interphase Corporation
"Interphase is a staunch supporter of the UDI specification," said Felix Diaz, chief technology officer for
Interphase Corporation, a developer of high performance LAN, Fibre Channel, WAN and remote access
adapters. "The UDI architecture will free us from many of the issues involved with supporting products on
multiple platforms, allowing us to concentrate more on the development of features and functionality
needed by our customers."
Press Contact:
Michael Eckley
Tel: 214-654-5325
Email:meckley@iphase.com
eocenter.com
introduction
Input and output devices on computers, such as storage or network adapters,
are accessed and controlled by the operating system through device-specific
software known as device drivers. Recently, these I/O devices have become
more intelligent and sophisticated and, consequently, their drivers have evolved
from simple routines into highly complex, multilayered programs. Because each
operating system has its own unique I/O system and device interface, hardware
vendors have been faced with the challenge of creating a different device
driver for each operating system (including each variant of the UNIX*
operating system) that they want their devices to support.
Creating High-performance Drivers for All I/O Devices
Two industry efforts are focused on standardizing platform and operating
system I/O interfaces with the aim of increasing device driver portability,
efficiency and performance while reducing the maintenance burden for device
driver developers. Project UDI is developing the Uniform Driver Interface
primarily focused on the UNIX operating system vendors, and the Intelligent
I/O (I2O) Special Interest Group (SIG) is creating a specification for intelligent
I/O solutions. More information about UDI can be found on the Internet at
sco.com. For further information about I2O, visit the SIG Web
site i2osig.org.
These two projects are complementary efforts that together will benefit the
industry, business Information Technology (IT) departments and users by
promoting portable, high-performance drivers for the full range of I/O devices. |
