Re: reserved system calls?

Jakub Jelinek (jakub@redhat.com)
Thu, 11 Nov 1999 23:14:52 +0100

On Thu, Nov 11, 1999 at 10:32:33PM +0100, Dominik Kubla wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 11, 1999 at 01:02:41PM -0500, sergey@memco.com wrote:
> ...
> >
> > Actualy system_call_table[] ( for Intel platform ) contains 256 elements
> > and one quater of them is still empty. There is no rule ( for now ) how to
> > use it. Actualy I think Linux should have special mechanism for register
> > and unregister dynamic system calls ( like Solaris OS ).
> >
>
> Actually there is one: new system calls are _ALWAYS_ appended at the end,
> unless they had a fixed value reserved earlier in the development cycle.

Don't stress the _ALWAYS_ too much. On Linux/SPARC and Linux/SPARC64 the
syscalls are inserted at the yet unused positions which are at random places
in the syscall table. Many syscall numbers were chosen to match SunOS syscall
numbers (which uses a different personality now but it was not like that
when SparcLinux started) and for backward compatibility this cannot be
changed now.

Cheers,
Jakub
___________________________________________________________________
Jakub Jelinek | jakub@redhat.com | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/~jj
Linux version 2.3.18 on a sparc64 machine (1343.49 BogoMips)
___________________________________________________________________

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