Uniform Driver Interface: Difference between revisions

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The Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) allows device drivers to be portable across both hardware platforms and operating systems without any changes to the driver source. With the participation of multiple OS, platform and device hardware vendors, UDI is the first interface which is likely to achieve such portability on a wide scale. UDI provides an encapsulating environment for drivers with well-defined interfaces which isolate drivers from OS policies and from platform and I/O bus dependencies. This allows driver development to be totally independent of OS 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.

While UDI could potentially benefit open source operating systems such as [[GNU/Linux]] by providing more driver support from companies, some [[open source]]/[[free software]] advocates fear that UDI would cause a proliferation of closed source drivers forand a reduction in open source/free operatingsupport by systemscompanies. [[Richard Stallman]] thinks that the project UDI does not benefit the [[free software]] movement. [http://linuxtoday.com/developer/1998100500205OP]