I have been running Linux 2.6 on QEMU and trying to use it to emulate a parallel port device that I don't physically have for a few exercises in the book "Linux Device Drivers 3rd Edition" (the host and guest have the same architecture). I have tried outputing the restults of i/o on the guest machine to a normal file on the host machine.
When I load the driver, I am able to request, read and write to the parallel port i/o region starting with 0x378
However, after writing to the virtual device on the guest, I see the file on the host is still empty. I have also tried an alternative set of boot parameters:
qemu-system-x86_64 -chardev file,path=./outputfile,id=parallel0 -device isa-parallel,chardev=parallel0,iobase=0x378,irq=7,index=0 --enable-kvm --smp 2 -initrd initramfs.igz -kernel arch/x86/boot/bzImage -m 1024 -append "console=ttyS0 loglevel=8" -nographic
(in which case I named my driver's device file parallel0), but this still made no difference.
Is there something I am missing in my boot parameters? I have read the user docs (which explicitly says it is possible to redirect a virtual parallel port on the guest to a host file via -parallel file:name) and asked on stackoverflow.com (where I was redirected to this mailing list) with no luck.
In addition, I would like to be able to emulate device interrupts from the virtual parallel port, is this possible too (I couldn't find any info about this either)?
Thank you,
Dylan