Recently I have come across a concept that may be usefull for NetBSD. I 
wish to make people aware of this concept so that it may be discussed in 
the context of (1) NetBSD, (2) the ever increasing demand on new drivers, 
(3) cross platform development, (4) a common/published standard for driver 
writers, etc.

This new concept is the "Uniform Driver Interface".

A brief description...

UDI, the Uniform Driver Interface, is a well-documented interface between a 
driver module and the executing OS. It provides source portability across 
OSes and binary portability within a processor ABI. It also provides modern 
driver features like instance independence, high scalability, and physical 
location transparency. The Reference Source provides an initial 
implementation of UDI for Linux, SCO UnixWare, SCO OpenServer, and other 
OSes.

Another brief description...

The UDI environment is a relatively autonomous, low-level I/O subsystem. It 
completely surrounds conforming device driver modules, providing them with 
a consistent interface to and from the host operating system and among 
cooperating drivers. Great care has been taken to isolate drivers from the 
"impedance matching" required for an I/O card to perform well on a given OS 
or platform. The driver is always invoked by procedure calls and interacts 
with the embedding OS and hardware via environment calls, providing the 
driver with full isolation from the details of its environment while 
retaining sufficient flexibility and performance in the OS.

URLS...

http://projectudi.sourceforge.net/
http://www.projectudi.org/f-home.html

Licensing, I believe, is the standard BSD License.

Please note that I am not an expert in such matters, I am only submitting 
it to this forum for discussion so that if there are any benefits it may be 
integrated (optionally) into NetBSD.

Please direct all public comments to the list and not to me - I am a 
subscriber to the list.

-- 
regards
Stephen Welker
Nemostar Pty Ltd
http://www.nemostar.com.au/