System calls and 64-bit architectures

Posted Dec 20, 2008 11:14 UTC (Sat) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
Parent article: System calls and 64-bit architectures

This is quite an interesting problem, and one we've also encountered with virtualization. Paravirtualized guests are a bit like processes, and like processes they can make hypercalls (which are a bit like system calls).

Where the complexity arises is system administrators want to run a mixture of 32 bit and 64 bit guests on a system (and on crazy architectures like IA64, they can even run a mixture of big and little endian guests). So there's a degree of complexity ensuring the guests are all passing identical C structs to hypercalls, particularly in the "32-on-64" case.

Rich.