NetBSD/share/man/man9/physio.9

.\"	$NetBSD: physio.9,v 1.6 2000/03/21 02:24:30 oster Exp $
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.\" by Paul Kranenburg.
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.Dd June 15, 1996
.Dt PHYSIO 9
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm physio
.Nd initiate I/O on raw devices
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Ft int
.Fo "physio"
.Fa "(*strategy)(struct buf *)"
.Fa "struct buf *bp"
.Fa "dev_t dev"
.Fa "int flags"
.Fa "(*minphys)(struct buf *)"
.Fa "struct uio *uio"
.Fc
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Fn physio
is a helper function typically called from character device read and write
routines to start I/O on a user process buffer.
It calls back on the provided
.Fa strategy
routine one or more times to complete the transfer described by
.Fa uio .
The maximum amount of data to transfer with each call to
.Fa strategy
is determined by the
.Fa minphys
routine.
Since
.Fa uio
normally describes user space addresses,
.Fn physio
needs to lock the appropriate data area into memory before each transaction
with
.Fa strategy ( see
.Xr vslock 9
and
.Xr vsunlock 9 ).
.Fn physio
always awaits the completion of the entire requested transfer before
returning, unless an error condition is detected earlier.
In all cases, the buffer passed in
.Fa bp
is locked (marked as
.Dq busy )
for the duration of the entire transfer.
.Pp
A break-down of the arguments follows:
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Fa strategy
The device strategy routine to call for each chunk of data to initiate
device I/O.
.It Fa bp
The buffer to use with the strategy routine.
The buffer flags will have
.Dv B_BUSY ,
.Dv B_PHYS ,
and
.Dv B_RAW
set when passed to the strategy routine.
If
.Dv NULL ,
a buffer is allocated from a system pool.
.It Fa dev
The device number identifying the device to interact with.
.It Fa flags
Direction of transfer; the only valid settings are
.Dv B_READ
or
.Dv B_WRITE .
.It Fa minphys
A device specific routine called to determine the maximum transfer size
that the device's strategy routine can handle.
.It Fa uio
The description of the entire transfer as requested by the user process.
Currently, the results of passing a
.Fa uio
structure with the
.Sq uio_segflg
set to anything other than
.Dv UIO_USERSPACE ,
are undefined.
.El
.Pp
.Sh RETURN VALUES
If successful
.Fn physio
returns 0.
.Er EFAULT
is returned if the address range described by
.Fa uio
is not accessable by the requesting process.
.Fn physio
will return any error resulting from calls to the device strategy routine,
by examining the
.Dv B_ERROR
buffer flag and the
.Sq b_error
field.
Note that the actual transfer size may be less than requested by
.Fa uio
if the device signals an
.Dq end of file
condition.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr read 2 ,
.Xr write 2