POSIX APIs and System Calls
Let’s start by stressing the difference between an application programmer interface (API) and a system call. The former is a function definition that specifies how to obtain a given service, while the latter is an explicit request to the kernel made via a software interrupt.
Unix systems include several libraries of functions that provide APIs to programmers. Some of the APIs defined by the libc standard C library refer to wrapper routines (routines whose only purpose is to issue a system call). Usually, each system call has a corresponding wrapper routine, which defines the API that application programs should employ.
The converse is not true, by the way—an API does not necessarily
correspond to a specific system call. First of all, the API could offer
its services directly in User Mode. (For something abstract such as math
functions, there may be no reason to make system calls.) Second, a
single API function could make several system calls. Moreover, several
API functions could make the same system call, but wrap extra
functionality around it. For instance, in Linux, the malloc( )
, calloc( )
, and free( )
APIs are implemented in the libc
library. The code in this library keeps track of the allocation and
deallocation requests and uses the brk(
)
system call to enlarge or shrink the process heap (see
the section "Managing the
Heap" in Chapter
9).
The POSIX standard refers to APIs and not to system calls. A system can be certified as POSIX-compliant ...
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