IOPL(2) 						     Linux Programmer's Manual							   IOPL(2)

NAME

       iopl - change I/O privilege level

SYNOPSIS

       #include <sys/io.h>

       int iopl(int level);

DESCRIPTION

       iopl() changes the I/O privilege level of the calling process, as specified 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  inter-
       rupts.  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.

RETURN VALUE

       On success, zero is returned.  On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

       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.

CONFORMING TO

       iopl() is Linux-specific and should not be used in processes intended to be portable.

NOTES

       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.

SEE ALSO

       ioperm(2), capabilities(7)

COLOPHON

       This page is part of release 3.27 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								    2004-05-27								   IOPL(2)