October 2000
Intermediate to advanced
704 pages
18h 13m
English
Content preview from Understanding the Linux Kernel
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Chapter 8. System Calls
Operating systems offer processes running in User Mode a set of interfaces to interact with hardware devices such as the CPU, disks, printers, and so on. Putting an extra layer between the application and the hardware has several advantages. First, it makes programming easier, freeing users from studying low-level programming characteristics of hardware devices. Second, it greatly increases system security, since the kernel can check the correctness of the request at the interface level before attempting to satisfy it. Last but not least, these interfaces make programs more portable since they can be compiled and executed correctly on any kernel that offers the same set of interfaces.
Unix systems implement most interfaces between User Mode processes and hardware devices by means of system calls issued to the kernel. This chapter examines in detail how system calls are implemented by the Linux kernel.
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