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IOPL(2) Linux Programmer's Manual IOPL(2)
iopl - change I/O privilege level
#include <sys/io.h>
int iopl(int level);
iopl() changes the I/O privilege level of the calling process, as
specified by the two least significant bits in level.
This call is necessary to allow 8514-compatible X servers to run
under Linux. Since these X servers require access to all 65536 I/O
ports, the ioperm(2) call is not sufficient.
In addition to granting unrestricted I/O port access, running at a
higher I/O privilege level also allows the process to disable
interrupts. This will probably crash the system, and is not
recommended.
Permissions are inherited by fork(2) and execve(2).
The I/O privilege level for a normal process is 0.
This call is mostly for the i386 architecture. On many other
architectures it does not exist or will always return an error.
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is
set appropriately.
EINVAL level is greater than 3.
ENOSYS This call is unimplemented.
EPERM The calling process has insufficient privilege to call iopl();
the CAP_SYS_RAWIO capability is required to raise the I/O
privilege level above its current value.
iopl() is Linux-specific and should not be used in programs that are
intended to be portable.
Libc5 treats it as a system call and has a prototype in <unistd.h>.
Glibc1 does not have a prototype. Glibc2 has a prototype both in
<sys/io.h> and in <sys/perm.h>. Avoid the latter, it is available on
i386 only.
ioperm(2), outb(2), capabilities(7)
This page is part of release 3.51 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 2013-03-15 IOPL(2)
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