DESCRIPTION
The pbio driver supports direct access to the Intel 8255A programmable peripheral interface (PPI) chip running in mode 0 (simple I/O). Such an interface provides 24 digital I/O lines. The driver is designed for performing I/O under program control using peripherals such as the Advantech PCL-724 card, which emulates the Intel 8255A PPI in mode 0. Other 8255A-based peripherals such as the BMC Messsysteme PIO24II card have also been reported to work. The PPI provides two 8-bit ports (port A and port B) and two 4-bit ports (port C upper, port C lower). Each port can be individually programmed for input and (latched) output, and appears at a different offset of the device’s base I/O address.
A separate register allows the configuration of ports for input or output. The device is so simple, that reliably probing for it when input data arrives at its terminals is impossible; therefore the kernel configuration has to specify the device’s base address. The device driver provides four character devices that correspond to the peripheral’s I/O ports. Opening a device for read or write automatically configures the corresponding hardware port for input or output. At boot time all ports are set configured for input to avoid damaging external circuitry.
A set of ioctl(2) requests allow polled input and paced output to be efficiently performed at the driver level without expensive user/kernel context switching. The driver can perform I/O in three different ways:
