I am designing an image processing application on Android that needs to access hardware registers from user space. The application is integrated to external/skia. First, I have to determine the virtual address of my hardware by doing a device open("/dev/mem", O_RDWR|O_SYNC) followed by a mmap(etc...)

Linux-2.6.29-dirty
Android Volume Deamon version 2.0

The open() is failing with a EACCES(13) error: I dont have permission.

I have noticed config files having the following flags:
CONFIG_DEVMEM
CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM
in Kconfig.debug in kernel/arch/x86 and in other places.

I also tried to alter the AndroidManifest.xml for my application (Camera) to add a permission called "HARDWARE_TEST". The PackageManager rejected the permission at boot-up.

Questions:
1. Who has permission to open the mem device ?
2. What is the usage of the config flags and can they help me?
3. Where is the master config file that generates all the generated files?
4. Is there anything I can do via the permission within the xml manifests ?

Thanks,

ES