[adding in glibc folk for comment] On 11/10/18 7:52 PM, Daniel Colascione wrote: > Now that glibc is basically not adding any new system call wrappers, > how about publishing an "official" system call glue library as part of > the kernel distribution, along with the uapi headers? I don't think > it's reasonable to expect people to keep using syscall(__NR_XXX) for > all new functionality, especially as the system grows increasingly > sophisticated capabilities (like the new mount API, and hopefully the > new process API) outside the strictures of the POSIX process. As a quick glance at the glibc NEWS file shows, the above is not quite true: [[ Version 2.28 * The renameat2 function has been added... * The statx function has been added... Version 2.27 * Support for memory protection keys was added. The <sys/mman.h> header now declares the functions pkey_alloc, pkey_free, pkey_mprotect... * The copy_file_range function was added. Version 2.26 * New wrappers for the Linux-specific system calls preadv2 and pwritev2. Version 2.25 * The getrandom [function] have been added. ]] I make that 11 system call wrappers added in the last 2 years. That said, of course, there are many system calls that lack wrappers [1], and the use of syscall() is undesirable. The glibc folk do have their reasons for being conservative around adding system calls (https://lwn.net/Articles/655028/). However, at this point, I think one of the limiting factors is developer time on the glibc project. Quite possibly, they just need some help to add more (properly designed) wrappers faster. Cheers, Michael [1] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6399 is a longstanding example. -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
