Does this have any relationship to I2O?? I notice Intel is not mentioned:
FLORHAM PARK, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 24, 1998--
Project UDI Seeks to Facilitate Portability of Device Drivers
Project UDI, a collaborative development group, today announced
its intention to demonstrate the implementation of UDI (Uniform
Driver Interface) technology at the upcoming SCO Forum and UniForum
Conference taking place August 17-19, 1998, in Santa Cruz, Calif.
UDI is a new device driver architecture which allows portability
of device drivers among existing hardware and operating system
environments without the need for special I/O processors or other
hardware requirements. Participants in Project UDI include system
vendors, adapter vendors, government contractors, and government
agencies.
The impetus for the UDI development effort lies in the fact that
device drivers have to be re-written or modified for each hardware
platform and operating system on which a particular device runs. As
new I/O technologies are developed, adapter card manufacturers and
system developers must expend significant effort to build and
maintain a full suite of device drivers. This can often be a
time-consuming process which significantly delays the practical
implementation and widespread support for new products.
"The Uniform Driver Interface allows drivers to be ported across
hardware platforms and across operating systems without any changes
to the driver source," said Kevin Quick, chairman of Project UDI.
"By providing a single interface, which is identical across all
supported platforms and OS's, vendors can develop a single driver
which runs without any modification on a wide range of systems. As a
result, vendors can focus on stability, performance, and enhanced
features rather than spending time porting from one operating system
to another."
UDI Proof of Concept
The validity of UDI technology was proven at a recent prototype
demonstration involving both networking and storage technologies
across multiple platforms. Single UDI-compliant drivers for the
Adaptec 2940UW Ultra-Wide SCSI adapter and the Interphase 5524
Fast-Ethernet adapter were demonstrated in multiple platforms. Each
adapter driver was compiled from a single set of source code that
contained no compile time or run time checks for specific operating
systems or platform type, demonstrating the full portability of the
UDI architecture.
Disparate hardware and operating system platforms including
DIGITAL UNIX on Alpha, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX on PA-RISC, IBM AIX on
PowerPC, NCR UNIX MP-RAS, the SCO UnixWare system on Intel IA32
(x86), and Sun Microsystems' Solaris on SPARC were utilized to
demonstrate the ability to run UDI drivers on a wide range of
systems. This range of equipment showed UDI's ability to perform
with diverse operating parameters including both 32- and 64-bit
processors, big and little endianness, single and multi-processor, as
well as differing DMA and memory cache implementations. All UDI
implementations also showed seamless co-existence with their
respective native I/O support environments.
Demonstrating the potential for vertically integrated solutions
based on UDI, an application utilizing a customized Lockheed-Martin
protocol was also successfully run over the networking adapter used
in the prototype demonstration. Lockheed-Martin is also developing
UDI support for SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface) implementations.
About UDI Technology
UDI is designed to function alongside existing driver support
environments allowing vendors to maintain support for legacy drivers
while moving to UDI technology. UDI features are fully developed and
may be used as the sole driver environment where legacy support is
not required. UDI has been developed over the past few years and
incorporates many features and capabilities that are not present in
existing driver environments, making it well suited to support
advanced architectures such as those using Intel's upcoming Merced
processor.
The benefits of this include the rapid and widespread
availability of support for I/O technologies regardless of system or
operating system, and a single code base for each device. By
reducing device support to a single set of code, adapter vendors can
drastically reduce development and support costs for device drivers
on multiple platforms and focus resources more effectively on core
technology and product development. UDI is also attractive to the
government sector because it provides a portable open standard for
device support that can be used in embedded real-time situations as
well as more traditional I/O environments.
About Project UDI
Project UDI is an open multi-vendor working group formed in 1994
for the purpose of creating an OS-neutral device driver standard
through an open development process. Current members of the working
group include Adaptec Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation,
Hewlett-Packard Corporation, IBM Corporation, Interphase Corporation,
Lockheed Martin, NCR, SCO, and Sun Microsystems. Membership is open
to any interested parties. Additional information about Project UDI
and UDI technology is available through the UDI web site at
sco.com. |
