diff --git a/blog/content/second-edition/posts/05-integration-tests/index.md b/blog/content/second-edition/posts/05-integration-tests/index.md index 2cf0fb0b..150ed0b9 100644 --- a/blog/content/second-edition/posts/05-integration-tests/index.md +++ b/blog/content/second-edition/posts/05-integration-tests/index.md @@ -45,7 +45,13 @@ The chips implementing a serial interface are called [UARTs]. There are [lots of [16550 UART]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART ### Port I/O - TODO +There are two different approaches for communicating between the CPU and peripheral hardware on x86, **memory-mapped I/O** and **port-mapped I/O**. We already used memory-mapped I/O for accessing the [VGA text buffer] through the memory address `0xb8000`. This address is not mapped to RAM, but to some memory on the GPU. + +[VGA text buffer]: ./second-edition/posts/03-vga-text-buffer/index.md + +In contrast, port-mapped I/O uses a separate I/O bus for communication. Each connected peripheral has one or more port numbers. To communicate with such an I/O port there are special CPU instructions called `in` and `out`, which take a port number and a data byte (there are also variations of these commands that allow sending an `u16` or `u32`). + +The UART uses port-mapped I/O. Fortunately there are already several crates that provide abstractions for I/O ports, so we don't need to invoke the `in` and `out` assembly commands manually. ### Implementation