timerfd() and system call review [LWN.net]

timerfd() and system call review

Posted Aug 15, 2007 0:49 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
Parent article: timerfd() and system call review

IETF requires two independent implementations before approving a protocol. Something similar should be true for system calls: used by two independent applications. There's a lot of narrow thinking exposed in some system calls, and this would widen that. I've had the joy of using the TASKSTATS feature in a way not forseen by its author and until recently it wouldn't compile from user space at all since its header file was omitted.

(Log in to post comments)

timerfd() and system call review

Posted Aug 16, 2007 11:45 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

But a syscall can't easily be used by any applications until it's in glibc
or some other library, and once it is you can't change it because it's
exposed to applications so you can't tell who might be using it.

(Most of these new syscalls are Linux-specific, anyway, and thus likely to
see comparatively little use outside of abstraction layers like glibc.
POSIX still remains king.)