The Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) is a defunct project developed by several companies to define a portable interface for
device drivers.
The Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) allowed device drivers to be portable across both hardware platforms and
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
s without any changes to the driver source. With the participation of multiple OS, platform and device hardware vendors, UDI was intended to be the first interface which was likely to achieve such portability on a wide scale. UDI provided an encapsulating environment for drivers with well-defined interfaces which isolated drivers from OS policies and from platform and I/O bus dependencies. In principle, this allowed driver development to be totally independent of OS development. In addition, the UDI architecture was intended to insulate 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
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 ...
and
*BSD by providing more driver support from companies, some
open source/
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
advocates feared 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
Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...
(the leader of the
free software movement
The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...
) has claimed that the project does not benefit the free software movement
See also
*
I2O
*
Network Driver Interface Specification
The Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) is an application programming interface (API) for network interface controllers (NICs).
Specification
It was jointly developed by Microsoft and 3Com Corporation and is mostly used in Microsoft Wind ...
(NDIS)
*
Open Data-Link Interface (ODI)
*
Universal Network Device Interface (UNDI)
*
PC/TCP Packet Driver
References
#
#
External links
Project UDIUDI Reference Implementation
Device drivers
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