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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.
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Not every Unix-like system entertains the concept of having the user control the data segment. The Mac OS X implementation of sbrk is an emulation and has a maximum allocation of 4 megabytes. On first call an area exactly this large is allocated to hold the simulated segment. When this limit is reached, −1 is returned and the errno is set to ...
The exec calls named ending with an e alter the environment for the new process image by passing a list of environment settings through the envp argument. This argument is an array of character pointers; each element (except for the final element) points to a null-terminated string defining an environment variable .
stat() is a Unix system call that returns file attributes about an inode. The semantics of stat() vary between operating systems. As an example, Unix command ls uses this system call to retrieve information on files that includes: atime: time of last access (ls -lu) mtime: time of last modification (ls -l) ctime: time of last status change (ls -lc)
sync is a standard system call in the Unix operating system, which commits all data from the kernel filesystem buffers to non-volatile storage, i.e., data which has been scheduled for writing via low-level I/O system calls. Higher-level I/O layers such as stdio may maintain separate buffers of their own.
For most file systems, a program initializes access to a file in a file system using the open system call. This allocates resources associated to the file (the file descriptor), and returns a handle that the process will use to refer to that file. In some cases the open is performed by the first access.
Entropy-supplying system calls are system calls in Unix-like operating system kernels through which processes can obtain entropic or random data. The first of these was getentropy , introduced to the OpenBSD operating system in release 5.6 (November 2014), as a refactoring of the sysctl(3) KERN_ARND approach used since 1997. [ 1 ]