XF86SUP Driver
This driver is a helper driver for the XFree86/OS2
project. Note this is NOT XFree86/OS2 itself. This driver offers some
features which were missing in OS/2 before or were available inefficiently
only.
You can download the latest driver from here.
It is a multiple device driver containing the following sub-devices:
- /dev/pmap$
- gives you access to the physical memory of the PC. Warning: you should never
use this to access the main RAM memory, as this could cause severe damage to
the integrity of data managed by the OS/2 system (I once managed to crash the
system this way and this corrupted the system so severely that I needed to
re-install), but only to access adapter memory (data acquisition cards or
aperture video memory) which you know for sure that OS/2 does not know or
manage it itself. Required for Xservers for instance.
- /dev/fastio$
- allows a fast method - the fastest possible - of getting access to I/O ports.
Required for XFree86/OS2 for instance.
- /dev/tty[pq][0-f], /dev/pty[pq][0-f], /dev/ptms$
- These are drivers that closely emulate 4.4BSD pseudo-TTY drivers (PTYs);
such drivers are required to get xterm and xdm for XFree86/OS2 running. Also
a future version of Emacs for OS/2 will take advantage of these devices.
- /dev/console$
- This emulates a Unix style /dev/console device. This understands the
TIOCCONS ioctl and other BSD ioctls. Also the PTYs may grab the console
(required for xterm -C and xconsole).
A spinoff of the XFree86/OS2 project and my research on
SES is the following code:
A function in the recent version of the xf86sup.sys driver that implements
the "kill -9" feature of Unix (Fixpack 17 required). Get the recent driver, API and sample code (xf86sup.sys binaries only).
In Warp3, FP38, a kernel bug prevents this feature
to work. This is supposedly fixed in FP40. For now, a workaround is to
use the DOSCALL1.DLL from FP37 to get the feature again.
This page was accessed 
times since Jan 25th, 1996
Reply to: Holger.Veit@gmd.de