iopl(2) System Calls Manual iopl(2)
NAME
iopl - change I/O privilege level
LIBRARY
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/io.h>
[[deprecated]] int iopl(int level);
DESCRIPTION
iopl() changes the I/O privilege level of the calling thread, as speci-
fied by the two least significant bits in level.
The I/O privilege level for a normal thread is 0. Permissions are in-
herited from parents to children.
This call is deprecated, is significantly slower than ioperm(2), and is
only provided for older X servers which require access to all 65536 I/O
ports. It is mostly for the i386 architecture. On many other architec-
tures it does not exist or will always return an error.
RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is
set to indicate the error.
ERRORS
EINVAL level is greater than 3.
ENOSYS This call is unimplemented.
EPERM The calling thread has insufficient privilege to call iopl(); the
CAP_SYS_RAWIO capability is required to raise the I/O privilege
level above its current value.
VERSIONS
glibc2 has a prototype both in <sys/io.h> and in <sys/perm.h>. Avoid
the latter, it is available on i386 only.
STANDARDS
Linux.
HISTORY
Prior to Linux 5.5 iopl() allowed the thread to disable interrupts while
running at a higher I/O privilege level. This will probably crash the
system, and is not recommended.
Prior to Linux 3.7, on some architectures (such as i386), permissions
were inherited by the child produced by fork(2) and were preserved
across execve(2). This behavior was inadvertently changed in Linux 3.7,
and won't be reinstated.
SEE ALSO
ioperm(2), outb(2), capabilities(7)
Linux man-pages 6.9.1 2024-05-02 iopl(2)
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