From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Feb 14 14:50:19 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from feral.com (feral.com [192.67.166.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DFBDF37B4EC for ; Wed, 14 Feb 2001 14:50:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from zeppo.feral.com (IDENT:mjacob@zeppo [192.67.166.71]) by feral.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA15226; Wed, 14 Feb 2001 14:50:01 -0800 Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 14:50:00 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Jacob Reply-To: mjacob@feral.com To: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=E9rard_Roudier?= Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: UDI environment now released. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > Being smart with kernel interface is important for drivers to be fast and > reliable. Puting some stinky layer between native kernel interfaces and > drivers looks horrible to me. > > Why isn't UDI proposed as a native kernel interface, instead? > Note that last time I read the specs, I haven't been this impressed.:) > In my opinion, UDI is trying to solve what was a very important problem about 10 years ago (a kernel ABI for single h/w classes and a common kernel API to provide more portable driver support). Various efforts (the AT&T and Solaris DDI/DKI and even the IEEE OBIOS efford come to mind) came about to try to tackle this. The problem is that at the time this was a huge issue there were a much larger number of machines and pieces of h/w and radically different OS's (or flavors within Unix even) to support. Such a wide set of differences is not really there any more, hence the cost of such support (and the style in which it is being done) makes less sense than it used to. -matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message