Glibc and the kernel user-space API

We are accustomed to thinking of a system call as being a direct service request to the kernel. However, in reality, most system call invocations are mediated by wrapper functions in the GNU C library (glibc). These wrapper functions eliminate work that the programmer would otherwise need to do in order to employ a system call. But it turns out that glibc does not provide wrapper functions for all system calls, including a few that see somewhat frequent use. The question of what (if anything) to do about this situation has arisen a few times in the last few months on the libc-alpha mailing list, and has recently surfaced once more.

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