[GSoC] universal list of syscalls

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2014 09:48:06 -0500, Edson Ticona said:
> Hi
> I guess I couldn't explain myself very well. Sorry for my english, but
> I was doing that just to understand pretty well everything about the
> system calls. The project is about standardizing system calls between
> architectures.

Good luck with that.  The biggest problem is that you can't merge the
architecture's syscall tables, because (for historical reasons) different
archs have different numbers for various syscalls.  Those are now baked
into the ABI and can't be changed.  So if arch A has the io_getevents()
syscall as 208, and arch B has it as 213, you're stuck....

The historical reasons?  Each arch tended to assign syscall numbers as
each syscall was wired up.  So it was possible for an arch to delay a bit
wiring up a syscall that needed per-arch support, wire up some other
syscalls, and then wire up the earlier syscall once the support was
written.  At which point all those syscalls have different numbers than
other archs that wired up the one syscall earlier.


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