Monday, January 2, 2012

IOCTL call

1 comment:

  1. An ioctl interface is a single system call by which userspace may communicate with device-drivers. Requests on a device-driver are vectored with respect to this ioctl system call, typically by a handle to the device and a request number. The basic kernel can thus allow the userspace to access a device-driver without knowing anything about the facilities supported by the device, and without needing an unmanageably large collection of system calls

    A Unix ioctl call takes as parameters:

    1. an open file descriptor
    2. a request code number
    3. either an integer value, possibly unsigned (going to the driver) or a pointer to data (either going to the driver, coming back from the driver, or both).

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