openfirm
—
Open Firmware interface
The /dev/openfirm device is an interface to the Open
Firmware device tree. This interface is highly stylized. It uses
ioctl(2)
calls for all operations. These calls refer to the nodes in the Open Firmware
device tree. The nodes are represented by package handles, which are simply
integer values describing data areas. Occasionally a package handle of 0 may
be used or returned instead, as described below.
The calls that only take and/or return the package handle of a
node use a pointer to a phandle_t for this purpose.
The others use a pointer to a struct ofiocdesc
descriptor, which has the following definition:
struct ofiocdesc {
phandle_t of_nodeid;
int of_namelen;
const char *of_name;
int of_buflen;
char *of_buf;
};
The of_nodeid member is the package handle
of the node that is passed in or returned. Strings are passed in via the
of_name member of of_namelen
length. The maximum accepted length of of_name is
OFIOCMAXNAME
. The of_buf
member is used to return strings except for the
OFIOCSET
call where it is also used to pass in a
string. In the latter case the maximum accepted length of
of_buf is OFIOCMAXVALUE
.
Generally, of_buf works in a value-result fashion. At
entry to the
ioctl(2)
call, of_buflen is expected to reflect the buffer
size. On return, of_buflen is updated to reflect the
buffer contents.
The following
ioctl(2)
calls are supported:
OFIOCGETOPTNODE
- Uses a phandle_t. Takes nothing and returns the
package handle of the /options node.
OFIOCGETNEXT
- Uses a phandle_t. Takes the package handle of a node
and returns the package handle of the next node in the Open Firmware
device tree. The node following the last node has a package handle of 0.
The node following the node with the package handle of 0 is the first
node.
OFIOCGETCHILD
- Uses a phandle_t. Takes the package handle of a node
and returns the package handle of the first child of that node. This child
may have siblings. These can be determined by using
OFIOCGETNEXT
. If the node does not have a child, a
package handle of 0 is returned.
OFIOCGET
- Uses a struct ofiocdesc. Takes the package handle of
a node and the name of a property. Returns the property value and its
length. If no such property is associated with that node, the length of
the value is set to -1. If the named property exists but has no value, the
length of the value is set to 0.
OFIOCGETPROPLEN
- Uses a struct ofiocdesc. Takes the package handle of
a node and the name of a property. Returns the length of the property
value. This call is the same as
OFIOCGET
except
that only the length of the property value is returned. It can be used to
determine whether a node has a particular property or whether a property
has a value without the need to provide memory for storing the value.
OFIOCSET
- Uses a struct ofiocdesc. Takes the package handle of
a node, the name of a property and a property value. Returns the property
value and the length that actually have been written. The Open Firmware
may choose to truncate the value if it is too long or write a valid value
instead if the given value is invalid for the particular property.
Therefore the returned value should be checked. The Open Firmware may also
completely refuse to write the given value to the property. In this case
EINVAL
is returned.
OFIOCNEXTPROP
- Uses a struct ofiocdesc. Takes the package handle of
a node and the name of a property. Returns the name and the length of the
next property of the node. If the property referenced by the given name is
the last property of the node,
ENOENT
is
returned.
OFIOCFINDDEVICE
- Uses a struct ofiocdesc. Takes the name or alias
name of a device node. Returns package handle of the node. If no matching
node is found,
ENOENT
is returned.
- /dev/openfirm
- Open Firmware interface node
The following may result in rejection of an operation:
- [
EBADF
]
- The requested operation requires permissions not specified at the call to
open
().
- [
EINVAL
]
- The given package handle is not 0 and does not correspond to any valid
node, or the given package handle is 0 where 0 is not allowed.
- [
ENAMETOOLONG
]
- The given name or value exceeds the maximum allowed length of
OFIOCMAXNAME
and
OFIOCMAXVALUE
bytes respectively.
ioctl(2),
ofwdump(8)
IEEE Std 1275-1994:,
IEEE Standard for Boot Firmware (Initialization
Configuration) Firmware:, Core Requirements and
Practices", IEEE Standards Organization,
ISBN 1-55937-426-8.
The openfirm
interface first appeared in
NetBSD 1.6. The first FreeBSD
version to include it was FreeBSD 5.0.
Due to limitations within Open Firmware itself, these functions run at elevated
priority and may adversely affect system performance.
For at least the /options node the
property value passed in to the OFIOCSET
call has to
be null-terminated and the value length passed in has to include the
terminating ‘\0
’. However, as with the
OFIOCGET
call, the returned value length does not
include the terminating ‘\0
’.