1IOPL(2) Linux Programmer's Manual IOPL(2)
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6 iopl - change I/O privilege level
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9 #include <sys/io.h>
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11 int iopl(int level);
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14 iopl() changes the I/O privilege level of the current process, as spec‐
15 ified in level.
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17 This call is necessary to allow 8514-compatible X servers to run under
18 Linux. Since these X servers require access to all 65536 I/O ports,
19 the ioperm() call is not sufficient.
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21 In addition to granting unrestricted I/O port access, running at a
22 higher I/O privilege level also allows the process to disable inter‐
23 rupts. This will probably crash the system, and is not recommended.
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25 Permissions are inherited by fork() and exec().
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27 The I/O privilege level for a normal process is 0.
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29 This call is mostly for the i386 architecture. On many other architec‐
30 tures it does not exist or will always return an error.
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33 On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is
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37 EINVAL level is greater than 3.
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39 ENOSYS This call is unimplemented.
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41 EPERM The calling process has insufficient privilege to call iopl();
42 the CAP_SYS_RAWIO capability is required.
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45 iopl() is Linux specific and should not be used in processes intended
46 to be portable.
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49 Libc5 treats it as a system call and has a prototype in <unistd.h>.
50 Glibc1 does not have a prototype. Glibc2 has a prototype both in
51 <sys/io.h> and in <sys/perm.h>. Avoid the latter, it is available on
52 i386 only.
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55 ioperm(2), capabilities(7)
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59Linux 2.6.6 2004-05-27 IOPL(2)