October 2000
Intermediate to advanced
704 pages
18h 44m
English
Recall from “Access to Kernel Services”, system calls are interfaces callable by user programs in order to have the kernel perform a specific function (e.g., opening a file) on behalf of the calling thread. System calls are part of the application programming interfaces (APIs) that ship with the operating system; they are documented in Section 2 of the manual pages. The invocation of a system call causes the processor to change from user mode to kernel mode. This change is accomplished on SPARC systems by means of the trap mechanism previously discussed.
System calls are referenced in the system through the kernel sysent table, which contains an entry for every system call supported on the system. ...
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