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Uniform Driver Interface
The Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) is a defunct project developed by several companies to define a portable interface for device drivers. The Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) allowed device drivers to be portable across both hardware platforms and operating systems without any changes to the driver source. With the participation of multiple OS, platform and device hardware vendors, UDI was intended to be the first interface which was likely to achieve such portability on a wide scale. UDI provided an encapsulating environment for drivers with well-defined interfaces which isolated drivers from OS policies and from platform and I/O bus dependencies. In principle, this allowed driver development to be totally independent of OS development. In addition, the UDI architecture was intended to insulate drivers from platform specifics such as byte-ordering, DMA implications, multi-processing, interrupt implementations and I/O bus topologies. While UDI could potentially benefit open source ope ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Device Driver
In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used. A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware connects. When a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device (drives it). Once the device sends data back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program. Drivers are hardware dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interface. Purpose The main purpose of device drivers is to provide abstraction by acting as a translator b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operating System
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of Scheduling (computing), processor time, mass storage, printing, and other resources. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or is interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer from cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers. The dominant general-purpose personal computer operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of aroun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Direct Memory Access
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems and allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU). Without DMA, when the CPU is using programmed input/output, it is typically fully occupied for the entire duration of the read or write operation, and is thus unavailable to perform other work. With DMA, the CPU first initiates the transfer, then it does other operations while the transfer is in progress, and it finally receives an interrupt from the DMA controller (DMAC) when the operation is done. This feature is useful at any time that the CPU cannot keep up with the rate of data transfer, or when the CPU needs to perform work while waiting for a relatively slow I/O data transfer. Many hardware systems use DMA, including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards and sound cards. DMA is also used for intra-chip data transfer in multi-core processors. Computers that have DMA channels can t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy. Popular Linux distributions include Debian, Fedora Linux, and Ubuntu, the latter of which itself consists of many different distributions and modifications, including Lubuntu and Xubuntu. Commercial distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise. Desktop Linux distributions include a windowing system such as X11 or Wayland, and a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE Plasma. Distributions intended for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems. FreeBSD has similarities with Linux, with two major differences in scope and licensing: FreeBSD maintains a complete system, i.e. the project delivers a kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation, as opposed to Linux only delivering a kernel and drivers, and relying on third-parties for system software; FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license, as opposed to the copyleft GPL used by Linux. The FreeBSD project includes a security team overseeing all software shipped in the base distribution. A wide range of additional third-party applications may be inst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open Source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery. Open source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint. Before the phrase ''open source'' became widely adopted, developers and producers have used a variety of other terms. ''Open source'' gai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program.Selling Free Software (gnu.org) Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices. The right to study and modify a computer program entails that source code< ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License. Stallman launched the GNU's Not Unix, GNU Project in September 1983 to write a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With this, he also launched the free software movement. He has been the GNU project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including, among others, the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Debugger, and Emacs, GNU Emacs text editor. Stallman pioneere ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Software Movement
The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the software (whether modified or not). Software which meets these requirements, The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software, is termed free software. Although drawing on traditions and philosophies among members of the 1970s hacker culture and academia, Richard Stallman formally founded the movement in 1983 by launching the GNU Project. Stallman later established the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement. Philosophy The philosophy of the movement is that the use of computers should not lead to people being prevented from cooperating with each other. In practice, this means rejecting proprietary software, which imposes such restrictions, and promoting free software, with the ultimate goal of liberating everyone in cyber ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Network Driver Interface Specification
The Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) is an application programming interface (API) for network interface controllers (NICs). Specification It was jointly developed by Microsoft and 3Com Corporation and is mostly used in Microsoft Windows. However, the open-source NDISwrapper and Project Evil driver wrapper projects allow many NDIS-compliant NICs to be used with Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. magnussoft ZETA, a derivative of BeOS, supports a number of NDIS drivers. The NDIS forms the logical link control (LLC) sublayer, which is the upper sublayer of the OSI data link layer (layer 2). Therefore, the NDIS acts as the interface between the media access control (MAC) sublayer, which is the lower sublayer of the data link layer, and the network layer (layer 3). The NDIS is a library of functions often referred to as a " wrapper" that hides the underlying complexity of the NIC hardware and serves as a standard interface for level 3 network protocol drivers and hardware ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open Data-Link Interface
The Open Data-Link Interface (ODI), developed by Apple and Novell, serves the same function as Microsoft and 3COM's Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS). Originally, ODI was written for NetWare and Macintosh environments. Like NDIS, ODI provides rules that establish a vendor-neutral interface between the protocol stack and the adapter driver. It resides in Layer 2, the Data Link layer, of the OSI model. This interface also enables one or more network drivers to support one or more protocol stacks. See also * Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) * Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) * Universal Network Device Interface (UNDI) * PC/TCP Packet Driver * Virtual Loadable Module (VLM) * NetWare I/O Subsystem (NIOS) * Personal NetWare (PNW) * DR-WebSpyder DR-WebSpyder is a DOS web browser, mail client and operating system runtime environment that was developed by Caldera UK in 1997. It was based on the DR-DOS operating system and networking components from N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Universal Network Device Interface
In computing, the Preboot eXecution Environment, PXE (most often pronounced as ''pixie'', often called PXE Boot/''pixie boot''.) specification describes a standardized client–server environment that boots a software assembly, retrieved from a network, on PXE-enabled clients. On the client side it requires only a PXE-capable network interface controller (NIC), and uses a small set of industry-standard network protocols such as DHCP and TFTP. The concept behind the PXE originated in the early days of protocols like BOOTP/DHCP/TFTP, and it forms part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard. In modern data centers, PXE is the most frequent choice for operating system booting, installation and deployment. Overview Since the beginning of computer networks, there has been a persistent need for client systems which can boot appropriate software images, with appropriate configuration parameters, both retrieved at boot time from one or more network servers. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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