Intelligent Input/Output (I2O) is a defunct computer input/output (I/O) specification. I2O was originally designed to make use of the

Intel i960 Intel's i960 (or 80960) was a RISC-based microprocessor design that became popular during the early 1990s as an embedded microcontroller. It became a best-selling CPU in that segment, along with the competing AMD 29000. In spite of its success, ...

microprocessor as the I/O offload engine, bringing channel I/O to the PC. I2O emerged from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

in the mid 1990s with the publication of the I2O specification in 1996 by the Intelligent I/O Special Interest Group, which dissolved as of 13 October 2000. I2O's principal architectural components included the I/O processor (IOP) and a split device driver model, with an OSM (OS Module) running in the host operating system and a HDM (Hardware Device Module) running on the I/O processor. This formally separated OS-specific driver functionality from the underlying device, and the two software components used message passing for communications. This split is suggestive of another initiative in which Intel participated at the time, the Uniform Driver Interface (UDI), which sought to establish a common device driver interface spanning multiple software platforms. I2O was plagued by several problems: the i960 was largely a failure and I2O made systems more expensive in a low cost marketplace. Additionally, the I2O SIG was seen as hostile to open source and insensitive to small players because it charged high fees for participation and was dominated by a few corporate players, notably Microsoft. While it remains unclear which of these factors caused the ultimate failure of I2O, only a few server class machines were ever built with onboard I2O. The I2O-SIG disbanded in October 2000, with a small amount of architectural information being made available via FTP at about the same time. A number of x86-compatible operating systems provided support (or still do) for I2O, including

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

(removed in 4.0removal commitcoverage
/ref>), Solaris, OpenBSD, and NetWare.

Examples of systems which utilized I2O

* Compaq Proliant * HP NetServer LH3000 * PERC 4 DC SCSI/i20 on Dell

PowerEdge The PowerEdge (PE) line is Dell's Server (computing), server computer product line. Most PowerEdge servers use the x86 architecture. The early exceptions to this, the PowerEdge 3250, PowerEdge 7150, and PowerEdge 7250, used Intel's Itanium pro ...

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

Express5800

References

External links

sco.com - I₂0

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20020526140758/http://intelligent-io.com/ intelligent-io.comfrom the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

wired.com - Consortium segregates the bus
{{DEFAULTSORT:I2o Input/output