I/O is one of the main jobs of a computer. This chapter furnishes insights regarding the capabilities and limitations of I/O hardware. It also discusses I/O services, the relationship between the I/O hardware and the application interface, UNIX System V STREAMS, and I/O performance.
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12.2.1 Memory-Mapped I/O
Figure 12.2: Device I/O port locations on PCs (partial) - 12.2.2 Polling
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12.2.3 Interrupts
Figure 12.3: Interrupt-driven I/O cycle 
Figure 12.4: Latency command on Mac OS X 
Figure 12.5: Intel Pentium processor event-vector table -
12.2.4 Direct Memory Access
Figure 12.6: Steps in a DMA transfer - 12.2.5 I/O Hardware Summary
- 12.3.1 Block and Character Devices
- 12.3.2 Network Devices
- 12.3.3 Clocks and Timers
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12.3.4 Nonblocking and Asynchronous I/O
Figure 12.9: Two I/O methods: (a) synchronous and (b) asynchronous - 12.3.5 Vectored I/O
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12.4.1 I/O Scheduling
Figure 12.10: Device-status table -
12.4.2 Buffering
Figure 12.11: Common PC and data-center I/O device and interface speeds - 12.4.3 Caching
- 12.4.4 Spooling and Device Reservation
- 12.4.5 Error Handling
- 12.4.6 I/O Protection
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12.4.7 Kernel Data Structures
Figure 12.12: Use of a system call to perform I/O 
Figure 12.13: Unix I/O kernel structure - 12.4.8 Power Management
- 12.4.9 Kernel I/O Subsystem Summary
