Messages in this thread |  | | | From | David Hollister <> | | Subject | Re: Linux, UDI and SCO. | | Date | Tue, 22 Sep 1998 07:38:13 -0600 (CST) |
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Gerard Roudier says: > > I have had a look into UDI books. This looks to me as the result on N > years of brain masturbation from 'has been' people that enjoy turning > simple things into complex ones since this makes feel them intelligent. > Let me doubt that a driver blindly written using these specs will work > without change on any architecture and be optimal enough not to be > ridiculous. All the UDI kernel interface reinvention will make debugging > a pain. What about the overhead in code lines and CPU cycles due UDI > stuff ?
The reason it's so complex is because all the *nix implementations are so different. It's quite an undertaking to attempt to create a standard interface among such varying implmentations. UDI prototype environments (without kernel modifications, of course) already exist for Solaris and HP-UX. I don't know about performance numbers but as I've said before, our own UDI-ish driver interface which is designed along somewhat the same lines as UDI has shown no real noticable performance difference for our HP-UX implementation (I'm not sure of Solaris performance numbers). I also have a Linux implementation which has also shown very similar performance to a native Linux driver I also wrote for one of our FDDI devices. > I am not against UDI. In fact I don't care of such proposal. I want an > O/S that fits my needs, and for now I have one that did'nt need UDI in > order to be so.
UDI isn't geared toward users. It's geared toward driver developers. Once an OS environment is in place, you don't need to worry about it. You write a new driver to drive some piece of hardware with the knowledge that all of the OS dependencies have already been taken care of. It's a tool for more rapid, standardized driver development. Whether the drivers your OS uses are written to UDI or not has no bearing on your use of that OS.
-- David Hollister Interphase Corporation dhollist@iphase.com Software Engineer Dallas, TX http://www.public.asu.edu/~dhollist
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