Alexandre Oliva 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.
I've forgotten the timing, but I don't think Posix had a full/useful
spec until well after Linux. AT&T's SVID spec (published for sysvr4
around 1989) would have been about right. Posix wasn't very complete
until 1995 or so.
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.
Doesn't that make glibc an extension of Linux instead of the other way
around? Will that same version run anywhere else?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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