Re: status of ppbus(4) and ppi(4)

[Hans Rosenfeld <rosenfeld%grumpf.hope-2000.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 12:19:39PM +0100, Michai Ramakers wrote:
> looking for a way to have clean interface to my (PC) parallel port, I
> saw ppbus(4). The manpage mentions user access to parallel ports can
> be done using ppi(4), but I am lacking that manpage (NetBSD 5.1).
> Googling for this turned up mails from around 2005 suggesting porting
> ppi.c/.h (this is not the GPIB interface) from FreeBSD.
> 
> What is at this moment the correct way to access parallel ports (as
> separate I/O-pins) from userland? If no architecture-independent
> interface exists (yet), i386 might be a fallback since I use that
> exclusively.

We have gpio(4) attaching at ppbus(4), which will give you control of
the parallel port pins. IIRC the gpio(4) interface is a bit clumsy,
requiring a syscall for each pin you access, but it was good enough to
drive a PIC programmer.


Hans


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