Chapter 3 DLPI Input/Output Controls

Input/Output Controls (ioctl) or IO control commands are used for communication between user application and STREAMS kernel modules with DLPI and drivers. The ioctls are defined in <sys/dlpi_ext.h>.

DLPI and HP-UX LAN device drivers are STREAMS-based. STREAMS enable the user applications to perform control functions using the ioctl calls on a stream attached to a driver instance.

	NOTE: All the LAN-class drivers can be accessed only through /dev/dlpi device file.

DLPI has provided ioctls to:

DLPI has also defined ioctls that are not interpreted by DLPI and are sent directly to the driver. These ioctls are called Transparent ioctls.

The two transparent ioctls defined by DLPI are as follows:

For more information on these ioctls, see “DL_HP_SET_DRV_PARAM_IOCTL” and “DL_HP_GET_DRV_PARAM_IOCTL”.

In addition to the transparent ioctls, this chapter contains detailed information on other ioctls supported by DLPI (see “Supported ioctls”).

The following section of this chapter contains information on how ioctls are processed.