The '''Uniform Driver Interface''' ('''UDI''') is a defunct project developed by several companies to define a portable interface for [[device driver]]s.
The Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) allowsallowed device drivers to be portable across both hardware platforms and [[operating system]]s without any changes to the driver source. With the participation of multiple OS, platform and device hardware vendors, UDI iswas intended to be the first interface which iswas likely to achieve such portability on a wide scale. UDI providesprovided an encapsulating environment for drivers with well-defined interfaces which isolateisolated drivers from OS policies and from platform and I/O bus dependencies. ThisIn principle, this allowsallowed driver development to be totally independent of OS development. In addition, the UDI architecture insulateswas intended to insulate drivers from platform specifics such as byte-ordering, [[Direct memory access|DMA]] implications, multi-processing, interrupt implementations and I/O bus topologies.
While UDI could potentially benefit open source operating systems such as [[Linux]] and *BSD by providing more driver support from companies, some [[open source]]/[[free software]] advocates fearfeared that UDI would cause a proliferation of closed source drivers and a reduction in open source support by companies, undermining the purpose of the free software and open source movements. [[Richard Stallman]] (the leader of the [[free software movement]]) has claimed that the project does not benefit the free software movement. [http://linuxtoday.com/developer/1998100500205OP]
