checking number of parallel ports installed and their port adresses

[Alexander Best]

thanks for the hint.

if spent a bit of time and turned the in/out opcodes to ppi ioctls. actually i
was very surprised about the results since you said the overhead wouldn't be
that big.

uploading a 256 kbyte file i got the following results:

using ppi: 17.120 seconds
using in/out opcodes: 8.001 seconds

so i think i'll rather stick to my old inline assembly code even if it can't
be considered nice programming style, but the ppi overhead isn't something i
can cope with in my app.

cheers.
alex

John Baldwin schrieb am 2009-07-23:
> On Wednesday 22 July 2009 3:31:54 pm Alexander Best wrote:
> > the ppi manual states that using ioctl with /dev/ppi is extremely
> > slow. i need
> > the parallel port to be really fast. i need to communicate with a
> > device that
> > uses asynchronous transfer at a rate of ~ 2 mhz. so i need the full
> > ISA bus
> > speed to be able to push/pull data to/from the parallel port
> > without any
> > delays. timing is really critical. if there's a lot of work to do
> > for the
> > scheduler and the io calls get queued too long the transfer will
> > fail.

> The overhead of ppi is probably in the noise on a modern CPU.  I
> think you
> should be fine with just using ppi(4).

> > actually i meant: how can i check the available parallel ports from
> > within my
> > app? is there a syscall i can use or something like that?

> You can look for ppcX devices perhaps.  The easiest way might be to
> enable
> ppi and look for /dev/ppiX devices in /dev.