The NetBSD Ppbus Project aims to remedy some of the
shortcomings of the current printer driver by porting to
NetBSD a more modern implementation of parallel port
support in FreeBSD called ppbus. It allows faster modes
of operation, IEEE 1284 support, and a generic abstract
layer that multiple devices such as printer, PLIP (parallel
port Internet protocol, similar to SLIP), and Zip drives. It
allows bidirectional communication and an abstract
parallel port interface that devices can attach to: the
many chipset implementations of the parallel port will
only have to provide this common interface.
