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To: Camron Rafizadeh who wrote (1389)	3/27/1998 3:07:00 PM
From: Camron Rafizadeh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5944

ALL: News New Specification Promises to Revolutionize the Implementation of Adapter Cards Across Disparate Operating Environments FLORHAM PARK, N.J. (March 27) 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 .