Nios® V Processor Software Developer Handbook

ID 743810
Date 5/26/2023
Public

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6.6. Using Character-Mode Devices

A character-mode device is a hardware peripheral that can send or receive characters serially. A common example is the UART. Character mode devices are registered as nodes in the HAL file system. In general, a program associates a file descriptor to a device’s name, and then writes and reads characters to or from the file using the ANSI C file operations defined in file.h. The HAL also supports the concept of standard input, standard output, and standard error, allowing programs to call the stdio.h I/O functions.