Re: Formal description of system call interface

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This is notes from the discussion we had at Linux Plumbers this week
> regarding providing a formal description of system calls (user API).
>
> The idea come up in the context of syzkaller, syscall fuzzer, which
> has descriptions for 1000+ syscalls mostly concentrating on types of
> arguments and return values. However, problems are that a small group
> of people can't write descriptions for all syscalls; can't keep them
> up-to-date and doesn't have necessary domain expertise to do correct
> descriptions in some cases.
>
> We identified a surprisingly large number of potential users for such
> descriptions:

Let me add one more: consolidation of all the incompatible arch
syscall tables.  A sufficiently descriptive format should be parseable
at build time to generate the syscall tables.