Requiring a shared library to access the kernel

Posted Sep 4, 2007 14:05 UTC (Tue) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027)
In reply to: LinuxConf.eu: Documentation and user-space API design by mjthayer
Parent article: LinuxConf.eu: Documentation and user-space API design

I have written more than handful of useful software that must access the kernel directly through an absolute system call interface. The interfaces of glibc cannot provide the required services, which include self-virtualization, auto relocation, introspection, control over binding, small size, speed, etc.

The history of glibc with regard to interface stability is not pretty, either. For example: @GLIBC_PRIVATE, hp_timing, _ctype_, *stat(), errno. It's important that both the kernel interfaces and the libc interfaces be well designed and well implemented and well documented.

Requiring a shared library to access the kernel

Posted Sep 5, 2007 0:29 UTC (Wed) by bartoldeman (guest, #4205) [Link]

'info libc' for Glibc 2.6.1 tells me:
This is Edition 0.10, last updated 2001-07-06, of `The GNU C Library
Reference Manual', for Version 2.3.x of the GNU C Library.
which does not look very promosing.

It would be great if someone could fund a technical writer to work on this manual... the POSIX threads documentation still talks about Linuxthreads instead of NPTL, and many of the new functions mentioned in NEWS are not documented at all, or documented elsewhere.

For instance, ppoll(2) is in the man pages but not in the glibc manual, and there are many others.

I usually try to check both man pages and info to be sure.