Linked by Eli Gottlieb on Thu 30th Nov 2006 17:42 UTC
On December 28th, 2005 - a day which will live in anonymity - OSNews published an editorial of mine urging hobby and research operating system developers to implement Project UDI, because otherwise we (the small/ non-mainstream/ hobby/research OS community) would always wind up stuck with mutually incompatible sets of drivers for doing the same exact things. I also proclaimed that I would implement UDI for my own operating system kernel. Bad decision.
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Member since:
2006-09-01
I didn't understand the technical details of this entirely (slightly over my head) but could this be used to write a driver for 3d hardware that protects the trade secrets and whatnot, that can be combined with the other half of the driver - the OS half, so that a single binary object (per ABI and hardware platform of course) could be compiled into many OSs (like Linux, Windows, Haiku, etc.)?
It would be awesome if there could be at least some practical separation (even if it isn't necessary or enforced) between the hardware side and the OS side (I assume that's what this is all about, but I've been wrong before) that would allow the hardware manufacturers to guard their precious (mostly hardware related) secrets by releasing the compiled libraries that go with their hardware, while allowing the OS part of the driver to be Open Source, for all to port and poke at.
Even better if there is an easy tool kit that will help hardware makers write their drivers to run on all of Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.