<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN"[]>

<book id="DoingIO">
 <bookinfo>
  <title>Bus-Independent Device Accesses</title>
  
  <authorgroup>
   <author>
    <firstname>Matthew</firstname>
    <surname>Wilcox</surname>
    <affiliation>
     <address>
      <email>matthew@wil.cx</email>
     </address>
    </affiliation>
   </author>
  </authorgroup>

  <authorgroup>
   <author>
    <firstname>Alan</firstname>
    <surname>Cox</surname>
    <affiliation>
     <address>
      <email>alan@redhat.com</email>
     </address>
    </affiliation>
   </author>
  </authorgroup>

  <copyright>
   <year>2001</year>
   <holder>Matthew Wilcox</holder>
  </copyright>

  <legalnotice>
   <para>
     This documentation is free software; you can redistribute
     it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
     License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
     version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
     version.
   </para>
      
   <para>
     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be
     useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
     warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
     See the GNU General Public License for more details.
   </para>
      
   <para>
     You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
     License along with this program; if not, write to the Free
     Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston,
     MA 02111-1307 USA
   </para>
      
   <para>
     For more details see the file COPYING in the source
     distribution of Linux.
   </para>
  </legalnotice>
 </bookinfo>

<toc></toc>

  <chapter id="intro">
      <title>Introduction</title>
  <para>
	Linux provides an API which abstracts performing IO across all busses
	and devices, allowing device drivers to be written independently of
	bus type.
  </para>
  </chapter>

  <chapter id="bugs">
     <title>Known Bugs And Assumptions</title>
  <para>
	None.	
  </para>
  </chapter>

  <chapter id="mmio">
    <title>Memory Mapped IO</title>
    <sect1>
      <title>Getting Access to the Device</title>
      <para>
	The most widely supported form of IO is memory mapped IO.
	That is, a part of the CPU's address space is interpreted
	not as accesses to memory, but as accesses to a device.  Some
	architectures define devices to be at a fixed address, but most
	have some method of discovering devices.  The PCI bus walk is a
	good example of such a scheme.	This document does not cover how
	to receive such an address, but assumes you are starting with one.
	Physical addresses are of type unsigned long. 
      </para>

      <para>
	This address should not be used directly.  Instead, to get an
	address suitable for passing to the accessor functions described
	below, you should call <function>ioremap</function>.
	An address suitable for accessing the device will be returned to you.
      </para>

      <para>
	After you've finished using the device (say, in your module's
	exit routine), call <function>iounmap</function> in order to return
	the address space to the kernel.  Most architectures allocate new
	address space each time you call <function>ioremap</function>, and
	they can run out unless you call <function>iounmap</function>.
      </para>
    </sect1>

    <sect1>
      <title>Accessing the device</title>
      <para>
	The part of the interface most used by drivers is reading and
	writing memory-mapped registers on the device.	Linux provides
	interfaces to read and write 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit
	quantities.  Due to a historical accident, these are named byte,
	word, long and quad accesses.  Both read and write accesses are
	supported; there is no prefetch support at this time.
      </para>

      <para>
	The functions are named <function>readb</function>,
	<function>readw</function>, <function>readl</function>,
	<function>readq</function>, <function>writeb</function>,
	<function>writew</function>, <function>writel</function> and
	<function>writeq</function>.
      </para>

      <para>
	Some devices (such as framebuffers) would like to use larger
	transfers than 8 bytes at a time.  For these devices, the
	<function>memcpy_toio</function>, <function>memcpy_fromio</function>
	and <function>memset_io</function> functions are provided.
	Do not use memset or memcpy on IO addresses; they
	are not guaranteed to copy data in order.
      </para>

      <para>
	The read and write functions are defined to be ordered. That is the
	compiler is not permitted to reorder the I/O sequence. When the 
	ordering can be compiler optimised, you can use <function>
	__readb</function> and friends to indicate the relaxed ordering. Use 
	this with care. The <function>rmb</function> provides a read memory 
	barrier. The <function>wmb</function> provides a write memory barrier.
      </para>

      <para>
	While the basic functions are defined to be synchronous with respect
	to each other and ordered with respect to each other the busses the
	devices sit on may themselves have asynchronicity. In particular many
	authors are burned by the fact that PCI bus writes are posted
	asynchronously. A driver author must issue a read from the same
	device to ensure that writes have occurred in the specific cases the
	author cares. This kind of property cannot be hidden from driver
	writers in the API.
      </para>
    </sect1>

    <sect1>
      <title>ISA legacy functions</title>
      <para>
	On older kernels (2.2 and earlier) the ISA bus could be read or
	written with these functions and without ioremap being used. This is
	no longer true in Linux 2.4. A set of equivalent functions exist for
	easy legacy driver porting. The functions available are prefixed
	with 'isa_' and are <function>isa_readb</function>,
	<function>isa_writeb</function>, <function>isa_readw</function>, 
	<function>isa_writew</function>, <function>isa_readl</function>,
	<function>isa_writel</function>, <function>isa_memcpy_fromio</function>
	and <function>isa_memcpy_toio</function>
      </para>
      <para>
	These functions should not be used in new drivers, and will
	eventually be going away.
      </para>
    </sect1>

  </chapter>

  <chapter>
    <title>Port Space Accesses</title>
    <sect1>
      <title>Port Space Explained</title>

      <para>
	Another form of IO commonly supported is Port Space.  This is a
	range of addresses separate to the normal memory address space.
	Access to these addresses is generally not as fast as accesses
	to the memory mapped addresses, and it also has a potentially
	smaller address space.
      </para>

      <para>
	Unlike memory mapped IO, no preparation is required
	to access port space.
      </para>

    </sect1>
    <sect1>
      <title>Accessing Port Space</title>
      <para>
	Accesses to this space are provided through a set of functions
	which allow 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit accesses; also
	known as byte, word and long.  These functions are
	<function>inb</function>, <function>inw</function>,
	<function>inl</function>, <function>outb</function>,
	<function>outw</function> and <function>outl</function>.
      </para>

      <para>
	Some variants are provided for these functions.  Some devices
	require that accesses to their ports are slowed down.  This
	functionality is provided by appending a <function>_p</function>
	to the end of the function.  There are also equivalents to memcpy.
	The <function>ins</function> and <function>outs</function>
	functions copy bytes, words or longs to the given port.
      </para>
    </sect1>

  </chapter>

  <chapter id="pubfunctions">
     <title>Public Functions Provided</title>
!Einclude/asm-i386/io.h
  </chapter>

</book>
