Subversion Repositories or1k

    Matthew

    Wilcox

      matthew@wil.cx

    Alan

    Cox

      alan@redhat.com

   2001

   Matthew Wilcox

     This documentation is free software; you can redistribute

     it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public

     License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either

     version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later

     version.

     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be

     useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied

     warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

     See the GNU General Public License for more details.

     You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public

     License along with this program; if not, write to the Free

     Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston,

     MA 02111-1307 USA

     For more details see the file COPYING in the source

     distribution of Linux.

        Linux provides an API which abstracts performing IO across all busses

        and devices, allowing device drivers to be written independently of

        bus type.

        None.

        The most widely supported form of IO is memory mapped IO.

        That is, a part of the CPU's address space is interpreted

        not as accesses to memory, but as accesses to a device.  Some

        architectures define devices to be at a fixed address, but most

        have some method of discovering devices.  The PCI bus walk is a

        good example of such a scheme.  This document does not cover how

        to receive such an address, but assumes you are starting with one.

        Physical addresses are of type unsigned long.

        This address should not be used directly.  Instead, to get an

        address suitable for passing to the accessor functions described

        below, you should call ioremap.

        An address suitable for accessing the device will be returned to you.

        After you've finished using the device (say, in your module's

        exit routine), call iounmap in order to return

        the address space to the kernel.  Most architectures allocate new

        address space each time you call ioremap, and

        they can run out unless you call iounmap.

        The part of the interface most used by drivers is reading and

        writing memory-mapped registers on the device.  Linux provides

        interfaces to read and write 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit

        quantities.  Due to a historical accident, these are named byte,

        word, long and quad accesses.  Both read and write accesses are

        supported; there is no prefetch support at this time.

        The functions are named readb,

        readw, readl,

        readq, writeb,

        writew, writel and

        writeq.

        Some devices (such as framebuffers) would like to use larger

        transfers than 8 bytes at a time.  For these devices, the

        memcpy_toio, memcpy_fromio

        and memset_io functions are provided.

        Do not use memset or memcpy on IO addresses; they

        are not guaranteed to copy data in order.

        The read and write functions are defined to be ordered. That is the

        compiler is not permitted to reorder the I/O sequence. When the

        ordering can be compiler optimised, you can use 

        __readb and friends to indicate the relaxed ordering. Use

        this with care. The rmb provides a read memory

        barrier. The wmb provides a write memory barrier.

        While the basic functions are defined to be synchronous with respect

        to each other and ordered with respect to each other the busses the

        devices sit on may themselves have asynchronocity. In paticular many

        authors are burned by the fact that PCI bus writes are posted

        asynchronously. A driver author must issue a read from the same

        device to ensure that writes have occurred in the specific cases the

        author cares. This kind of property cannot be hidden from driver

        writers in the API.

        On older kernels (2.2 and earlier) the ISA bus could be read or

        written with these functions and without ioremap being used. This is

        no longer true in Linux 2.4. A set of equivalent functions exist for

        easy legacy driver porting. The functions available are prefixed

        with 'isa_' and are isa_readb,

        isa_writeb, isa_readw,

        isa_writew, isa_readl,

        isa_writel, isa_memcpy_fromio

        and isa_memcpy_toio

        These functions should not be used in new drivers, and will

        eventually be going away.

        Another form of IO commonly supported is Port Space.  This is a

        range of addresses separate to the normal memory address space.

        Access to these addresses is generally not as fast as accesses

        to the memory mapped addresses, and it also has a potentially

        smaller address space.

        Unlike memory mapped IO, no preparation is required

        to access port space.

        Accesses to this space are provided through a set of functions

        which allow 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit accesses; also

        known as byte, word and long.  These functions are

        inb, inw,

        inl, outb,

        outw and outl.

        Some variants are provided for these functions.  Some devices

        require that accesses to their ports are slowed down.  This

        functionality is provided by appending a _p

        to the end of the function.  There are also equivalents to memcpy.

        The ins and outs

        functions copy bytes, words or longs to the given port.

!Einclude/asm-i386/io.h