iopl (2)
Leading comments
Copyright 1993 Rickard E. Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) Portions extracted from linux/kernel/ioport.c (no copyright notice). %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed un...
NAME
iopl - change I/O privilege levelSYNOPSIS
#include <sys/io.h>int iopl(int level);
DESCRIPTION
iopl() changes the I/O privilege level of the calling process, as specified by the two least significant bits in level.This call is necessary to allow 8514-compatible X servers to run under Linux. Since these X servers require access to all 65536 I/O ports, the ioperm(2) call is not sufficient.
In addition to granting unrestricted I/O port access, running at a higher I/O privilege level also allows the process to disable interrupts. This will probably crash the system, and is not recommended.
Permissions are inherited by fork(2) and execve(2).
The I/O privilege level for a normal process is 0.
This call is mostly for the i386 architecture. On many other architectures it does not exist or will always return an error.
RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.ERRORS
- EINVAL
- level is greater than 3.
- ENOSYS
- This call is unimplemented.
- EPERM
- The calling process has insufficient privilege to call iopl(); the CAP_SYS_RAWIO capability is required to raise the I/O privilege level above its current value.