15.2 Port Drivers

It is possible to write a driver in C according to certain principles and dynamically link it to the Erlang runtime system. The linked-in driver looks like a port from the Erlang programmer's point of view and is called a port driver.

Warning

An erroneous port driver causes the entire Erlang runtime system to leak memory, hang or crash.

For information about port drivers, see the erl_driver(4) manual page in ERTS, driver_entry(1) manual page in ERTS, and erl_ddll(3) manual page in Kernel.