support for calling Linux syscalls directly
Mike Frysinger
vapier@gentoo.org
Fri Jan 25 04:15:00 GMT 2013
spawning a new thread w/summarized info because the previous ones were going
in circles of "read the previous thread". so i read them.
to summarize, the anti-arguments were:
- it pollutes the ABI
- it takes up code space and sits there largely unused
- there are few users to justify the overhead
- people can use syscall() directly
- the kernel people could provide their own header
while the pro-arguments are:
- we already have a bunch syscall trampolines, some very old (init_module)
while others are recent (process_vm_readv, setns)
- having a single "authoritative" prototype location is better than people
open coding it in every project (especially when documentation is often scare
to non-existent) because it's very error prone
- a kernel header easily introduces API (define/enum/structure/etc...)
collisions (see recent network header thread as an easy example) that are non-
trivial to resolve
looking at linux/syscalls.list, there's actually quite a number in there that
i'd classify on the "uncommonly used" side, although i'll grant that kexec is
pushing the edge.
from the "pro" pov, i don't think people care whether the syscall is in the
shared C library and part of the official ABI. the focus is on there being 1
header for code to include. so i wonder if we couldn't satisfy people by
providing either static inlines or a libsyscall_nonshared.a that is referenced
via the libc.so linker script.
-mike
http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2013-01/msg00840.html [finit_module]
http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-06/msg00048.html [kexec v5]
http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-05/msg01645.html [kexec v4]
http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-05/msg01630.html [kexec v3]
http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-05/msg01623.html [kexec v2]
http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2012-05/msg01620.html [kexec v1]
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