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 http://www.sco.com/UDI
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 http://www.sco.com/UDI/review.html.
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 http://www.sco.com/UDI
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
SCO
"Project UDI is making serious headway in driving the standardization of
a common device driver for the industry," said Ray Anderson, SCO's senior
vice president, Marketing. "Now that the first iteration of the specification
is complete, the industry can begin to fully see the value of this model.
SCO strongly supports this movement and believes it will help to accelerate
the adoption of standard Intel platforms in the enterprise."
Press Contact:
Brian Ziel
Tel: 831-427-7252
Email:brianz@sco.com
Other Contacts:
Adaptec
Eric Brown
(408)957-1758
Email:ebrown@corp.adaptec.com
Intel Corporation
Jane Rauckhorst
(408) 765-7026
Email:jane.rauckhorst@intel.com
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