Re: ptcd(4), a driver for the cash drawer port on the PROTECH PS3100 point of sale terminal

[Iain Hibbert <plunky%ogmig.net@localhost>]

On Sat, 15 Dec 2012, Marc Balmer wrote:

> The attached small driver adds support for the cash drawer port found on
> the PROTECH PS3100 point of sale terminal by providing a gpio(4) device
> with two pins.  Pin 0 controls the drawer kickout, pin 1 is used to read
> the sense pin, i.e. whether the drawer is currently open or not (as
> reported by the till hardware).
>
> Note that there is no way to detect it the hardware is present or not,
> so this driver should only be used for custom kernel configurations.

- should some variant of that be mentioned in the manpage and match
  function?

- there is a mis-spelling "pules" in a comment (=pulse)

- why in arch/i386/isa rather than dev/isa?

> A similar device driver for the IBM SurePos series (now Toshiba Global
> Commerce Solutions) will follow.

I wonder, since there is no way to detect this device, and the driver
seems to be entirely a wrapper for the inb/outb functions, is there not a
way to access the inb/outb from userland directly (with an ioctl or sysctl
maybe) and then control of such things as this could be done directly with
a simple-script and not require a custom kernel?

regards,
iain