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A high-level overview of the Linux kernel's system call interface, which handles communication between its various components and the userspace. In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system [a] on which it is executed.
The system call interface of a kernel is the set of all implemented and available system calls in a kernel. In the Linux kernel, various subsystems, such as the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), define their own system calls, all of which are part of the system call interface.
In computing, a system call is how a process requests a service from an operating system's kernel that it does not normally have permission to run. System calls provide the interface between a process and the operating system. Most operations interacting with the system require permissions not available to a user-level process, e.g.,
Interfaces to exec and its implementations vary. Depending on programming language it may be accessible via one or more functions, and depending on operating system it may be represented with one or more actual system calls. For this reason exec is sometimes described as a collection of functions.
On Unix operating systems, two other vectored call interfaces are popular: the fcntl ("file control") system call configures open files, and is used in situations such as enabling non-blocking I/O; and the setsockopt ("set socket option") system call configures open network sockets, a facility used to configure the ipfw packet firewall on BSD ...
The set of the Linux kernel API that regards the interfaces exposed to user applications is fundamentally composed of UNIX and Linux-specific system calls. [201] A system call is an entry point into the Linux kernel. [202] For example, among the Linux-specific ones there is the family of the clone(2) system calls. [203]
How an application should make system calls to the operating system, and if the ABI specifies direct system calls rather than procedure calls to system call stubs, the system call numbers; In the case of a complete operating system ABI, the binary format of object files, program libraries, etc.
The monolithic model differs from other architectures such as the microkernel [1] [2] in that it alone defines a high-level virtual interface over computer hardware. A set of primitives or system calls implement all operating system services such as process management , concurrency , and memory management .