I/O Control

Many devices have characteristics and behavior that can be configured or tuned. The ioctl(2) system call and the ioctl(9E) driver entry point provide a mechanism for application programs to change and determine the status of a driver's configurable characteristics. For example, the baud rate of a serial communications port is usually configurable in this way.

The I/O control interface is open ended, enabling device drivers to define special commands for the device. The definition of the commands is entirely determined by the driver and is restricted only by the requirements of the application programs using the device and the device itself.

Certain classes of devices such as frame buffers or disks must support standard sets of I/O control requests. These standard I/O control interfaces are documented in the Solaris 2.7 Reference Manual. For example, fbio(7I) documents the I/O controls that frame buffers must support, and dkio(7I) documents standard disk I/O controls. See "Miscellaneous I/O Control " for more information on I/O control.

This manual does not cover I/O control commands.