Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
System Call Organization
Andy Lutomirski pointed out that Linux system calls were insane. In particular, he said it was virtually impossible to code for them in an architecture-independent way. There was no clean way, he said, to map between system call names and their numbers, to map between system call argument registers and logical system call arguments, or to identify which architectures implemented which system call.
The current source tree took care of all of these things on a per-architecture basis that was very messy. Various tools like strace, libseccomp, and glibc had various approaches that worked but that were also messy.
Andy said, "I'd like to see a master list in the kernel that lists, for every syscall, the name, the number for each architecture that implements it (using the AUDIT_ARCH semantics, probably), and the signature. The build process could parse this table to replace the current per-arch mess." He added, "More importantly, we could add a library in tools that exposes this information to userspace."
[...]
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