Documentation of Parallel and Serial port configuration?
Kuba Ober
kuba at mareimbrium.org
Thu Oct 6 17:23:31 CDT 2005
> If the bit-wise manipulation of the parallel port is exposed as some kind
> of interface under Win9x,
Yes. It's exposed by enabling access to all io ports by default.
> we can probably do better than inb() / outb().
You can't do any better than that. If an application does inb()/outb(), the
ioperm method is the only one that makes sense (when you run things on ia32).
> Advantages of using ppdev over simple inb() / outb() are:
> should support [*] cross-architecture (arm, alpha, powerpc, ...)
That'd be good for winelib only or wine-with-emulator (bochs? qemu?).
> should support [*] some esoteric devices (USB-parallel converters, ...)
At a huge performance penalty ;)
> The overhead in doing a syscall isn't significant as any outb() operation
> takes ~1us anyway
AFAIK, the overhead stems from the fact that instead of a machine instruction
you have to:
- process an exception in the kernel, which then signals SIGSEGV to the
process
- invoke the signal handler
- determine what's up and disassemble the instruction at CS:EIP
- invoke a function/syscall based on the disassembled instruction
If this isn't dog slow, I don't know what is. I wasn't entirely clear, the
syscall is the least of our worries in fact :)
> I suspect most programs designed to work under Win98 just hit the hardware,
> so obtaining permissions (doing ioperm() as root, for example) should work.
> If we have some mechanism for catching the program doing either inb() or
> outb(), then we could provide a better implement via the ppdev interface.
At the cost of slowing things down. For devices that bit bang data (like
programmers), this makes things unacceptably slow.
> I believe (from limited exposure) that under Win2k, accessing the parallel
> port is "more difficult". Applications may use some kind of .sys driver to
> expose a bit-wise interface to the parallel port, which may be part of some
> "standard". I guess this could be implemented using ppdev by some
> enthusiastic person.
Yep, that's another story entirely.
Cheers, Kuba
More information about the wine-devel
mailing list