The first demonstration of an ongoing effort to standardize hardware device drivers took place at SCO Forum this week. Project UDI – which stands for Uniform Driver Interface – was launched back in March as a collaborative development effort between SCO and Adaptec Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett- Packard Co, IBM Corp, NCR Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and others. The idea is to establish a new device driver architecture to enable portability of device drivers between existing hardware and operating systems, so that vendors need only develop a single driver. At SCO Forum, a driver was shown running on SCO UnixWare 2 and UnixWare 7, and HP-UX, by recompiling identical driver source code. It had also been tested on Compaq Digital Unix, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris, and on hardware platforms ranging from Intel to Alpha, PowerPC, PA-RISC and Sparc. It supposedly copes with 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs, big and little-endian byte ordering and strong and weak memory ordering. It currently supports SCSI Host Bus adapters and network interface cards, with pointing devices, fibre channel, USB and Intel Corp’s I20 on the way. Project UDI began from an open multi-vendor working group in 1994, and has support from government contractors such as Lockheed Martin Corp and government agencies such as the US Air Force’s Joint Open Systems task force, as well as from the vendors.
