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



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