ioctl.2: Move subsection on "ioctl structure" from ioctl_list(2) to ioctl(2)

In preparation for removing ioctl_list(2), let's preserve
some useful text that was added to ioctl_list(2)
by Andries Brouwer.

Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
This commit is contained in:
Michael Kerrisk 2020-04-16 08:57:18 +02:00
parent 02e701cde3
commit 91b00e53b3
1 changed files with 54 additions and 0 deletions

View File

@ -82,6 +82,7 @@ Macros and defines used in specifying an
.I request .I request
are located in the file are located in the file
.IR <sys/ioctl.h> . .IR <sys/ioctl.h> .
See NOTES.
.SH RETURN VALUE .SH RETURN VALUE
Usually, on success zero is returned. Usually, on success zero is returned.
A few A few
@ -139,6 +140,59 @@ call has unwanted side effects, that can be avoided under Linux
by giving it the by giving it the
.B O_NONBLOCK .B O_NONBLOCK
flag. flag.
.\"
.SS ioctl structure
.\" added two sections - aeb
Ioctl command values are 32-bit constants.
In principle these constants are completely arbitrary, but people have
tried to build some structure into them.
.PP
The old Linux situation was that of mostly 16-bit constants, where the
last byte is a serial number, and the preceding byte(s) give a type
indicating the driver.
Sometimes the major number was used: 0x03
for the
.B HDIO_*
ioctls, 0x06 for the
.B LP*
ioctls.
And sometimes
one or more ASCII letters were used.
For example,
.B TCGETS
has value
0x00005401, with 0x54 = \(aqT\(aq indicating the terminal driver, and
.B CYGETTIMEOUT
has value 0x00435906, with 0x43 0x59 = \(aqC\(aq \(aqY\(aq
indicating the cyclades driver.
.PP
Later (0.98p5) some more information was built into the number.
One has 2 direction bits
(00: none, 01: write, 10: read, 11: read/write)
followed by 14 size bits (giving the size of the argument),
followed by an 8-bit type (collecting the ioctls in groups
for a common purpose or a common driver), and an 8-bit
serial number.
.PP
The macros describing this structure live in
.I <asm/ioctl.h>
and are
.B _IO(type,nr)
and
.BR "{_IOR,_IOW,_IOWR}(type,nr,size)" .
They use
.I sizeof(size)
so that size is a
misnomer here: this third argument is a data type.
.PP
Note that the size bits are very unreliable: in lots of cases
they are wrong, either because of buggy macros using
.IR sizeof(sizeof(struct)) ,
or because of legacy values.
.PP
Thus, it seems that the new structure only gave disadvantages:
it does not help in checking, but it causes varying values
for the various architectures.
.SH SEE ALSO .SH SEE ALSO
.BR execve (2), .BR execve (2),
.BR fcntl (2), .BR fcntl (2),