On Jul 24, 2008, Nifty Fedora Mitch <niftyfedora@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Recall, the name of this line that joins the kernel (Linux) and > application space (think HelloWorld, X-windows and more) is the "question > I am asking". Of interest the "omissions" in the list of system calls > commonly show up as hardware specific ioctl() side doors. > Perhaps the answer is as simple as "glibc". I suspect that Posix is > slightly more apropos. The interface is mostly Posix, although there are GNU extensions to it. The implementation of the interface (with or without extensions) is provided by GNU libc. GNU libc borrows little more than system call numbers from Linux header files. At times, even the headers with this information had to be maintained separately from Linux, because Linux developers didn't want these headers to be ever included by userland. That's why I say Linux offers only an ABI to userland; there's no actual API to use from userland. Whatever APIs there are, they're provided by GNU libc. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
