kernel level drivers - next try

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Rolf Kalbermatter wrote:
> Saulius Krasuckas [saulius2 at ar.fi.lt] wrote:
> 
>> Today I have tried to compile ntoskrnl.exe, then checked out master 
>> branch, compiled stock Wine, then tried to run win32 app which do simple 
>> port I/O after it loads (GIVE)IO.SYS driver.  Driver simply loaded, did 
>> its initialization and immediatelly exited.
> 
> The IO sys driver I have worked with and made myself in the past
> 
> http://opengtoolkit.cvs.sourceforge.net/opengtoolkit/portIO/c_source/
> 
> (The whole opengtoolkit project is really related to a software called LabVIEW
> and this was a driver to give direct IO access to it, but the portio kernel
> driver and its user space DLL can be used from any application that can call DLLs).
> 
> did use a number of specific kernel functions such as 
> 
> NTKERNELAPI void Ke386SetIoAccessMap(int, IOPM *);
> NTKERNELAPI void Ke386QueryIoAccessMap(int, IOPM *);
> NTKERNELAPI void Ke386IoSetAccessProcess(PEPROCESS, int);
> NTKERNELAPI NTSTATUS PsLookupProcessByProcessId(IN ULONG ulProcId, OUT PEPROCESS * pEProcess);
> 
> which all were and maybe still are considered undocumented. These are for
> manipulating the IO permission map so that applications can directly use the
> inp and outp opcode in application space for enabled IO adresses.
> 
> Alternatively it can access IO ports through a kernel driver call using a combination
> of:
> 
> HalTranslateBusAddress
> MmMapIoSpace
> 
> So all these functions together with several more for standard kernel driver
> interaction with the system need to be exported by the subsystem that loads
> them (eg. ntoskrnl.exe or its helpers like hal.dll etc).
> 
> I'm not positive these can all be easily added to a process operating in user space
> without some specific kernel support for this functionality and in fact allowing
> full IO access to a user space application such as Wine just doesn't seem safe
> to me.
> 
> Especially the first method while being a bit faster for standard IO access is
> probably a real trouble to implement. I have not found a way to manipulate the
> Linux IO permission map without a specific kernel extension and don't think such
> an extension would ever make it in the mainstream kernel.
> 
> Rolf Kalbermatter
> 

Why do we need to give an application direct access to IO space?