Packing byte fields and an array object into struct

[krishna2prasad at gmail.com]

Hello,

I am trying to build a structure to be passed down to an I2C device driver. The driver expects a struct that has a data array of size 512 bytes among other things. This is my code -

    rd_wr       = 0x0   # Read operation
    i2c_addr    = addr
    mux         = mux_sel
    multi_len   = count
    cmd         = 0x0 
    i2c_inst_type = CHEL_I2C_AUTO_RD_TYPE_5
    flag        = CHEL_I2C_AUTO_VALID
    status      = 0x0 
    data        = array.array('B', (0 for x in range(0,512)))

    os_inst_bytes     = (struct.pack('B', rd_wr)          +
                         struct.pack('B', i2c_addr)       +
                         struct.pack('B', mux)            +
                         struct.pack('B', multi_len)      +   
                         struct.pack('B', cmd)            +
                         struct.pack('B', i2c_inst_type)  +
                         struct.pack('B', flag)           +
                         struct.pack('I', status)         +   
                         struct.pack('512B', data))

    #Convert to byte array
    os_inst = bytearray(os_inst_bytes)

    ret = fcntl.ioctl(self._dev_fd,
                          self.__IOWR(FXCB_FPGAIO_I2C_AUTO_OS_INST),
                          os_inst, 1)

I get an error like this -

591                              struct.pack('B', flag)           +
592                              struct.pack('I', status)         +

--> 593 struct.pack('512B', data))

error: pack requires exactly 512 arguments

In [1]:

Even though data is a 512 element array, it is not treat as such in this struct.pack. The data field is used to return data from the driver. I should be able to unpack the struct os_inst and read the data buffer after the IOCTL call. How can I achieve this ?

Thanks in advance!