On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 05:53:25PM -0500, Michael Kerrisk wrote: > Hi Daniel, > > On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Daniel Gollub <dgollub@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> found something which looks for me like a kernel/glibc syscall mismatch. >> >> The standard and the manpages and glibc have >> ssize_t readlink(..., size_t bufsize); >> >> But the kernel has >> >> linux-2.6/include/linux/syscalls.h: >> asmlinkage long sys_readlink(..., int bufsiz); >> >> All readlink prototypes, expect the one in the kernel, have an unsigned >> buffer size. > > I agree; the inconsistency is strange. Hmm. I am inclined not to agree. There is no reason to expect any particular relation between the kernel prototype of sys_foo (if such a function exists) and the user space prototype of the foo() C-library function. The POSIX standard, man-pages, libc include files document the userspace / libc interface, not the system call interface. The system call interface is mostly undocumented. The kernel prototype is chosen for kernel-internal or historical reasons. Andries sys_ppc32.c: /* Note: it is necessary to treat bufsiz as an unsigned int ... */ asmlinkage long compat_sys_readlink(..., u32 bufsiz) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
