osf1 man page for svatophys

svatophys(9r)															     svatophys(9r)

NAME
       svatophys - General: Converts a system virtual address to a physical address

SYNOPSIS
       kern_return_t svatophys(
	       vm_offset_t kern_addr,
	       vm_offset_t *phys_addr );

ARGUMENTS
       Specifies the kernel virtual address.  Specifies a pointer to the physical address to be filled in.

DESCRIPTION
       The  svatophys routine converts a system virtual address to the corresponding physical address. All address and data structure manipulation
       done within the kernel is performed using system virtual addresses.  Typically, system virtual addresses are a means  of  mapping  physical
       memory  and  I/O  space,  which often consists of device registers and DMA buffers. In contrast to this, devices are usually unaware of any
       virtual addressing and for this reason use physical addresses. You use the svatophys routine to perform this address translation.

       As an example of where you can use this address translation, a disk device driver can use DMA buffers to transfer blocks  of  data  to  the
       disk  (for  the case of a write operation). The data to be written to disk is present in system memory at a system virtual address known to
       the driver. To initiate the DMA operation, the disk driver can set up a command packet to specify a write operation to the underlying  disk
       controller  hardware.  This write command packet contains (among other things) the location of the DMA buffer as a physical address and the
       length of the buffer. Here, the driver calls the svatophys routine to translate the system virtual address of the DMA buffer to a  physical
       address in the command packet issued to the disk driver.

RETURN VALUES
       The  svatophys  routine returns the following: The address translation has been completed successfully.	Unable to perform address transla-
       tion. This value indicates that the address specified by the kern_addr argument is not a valid kernel or system virtual address.

																     svatophys(9r)