The kernel and the C library as a single project [LWN.net]

The kernel and the C library as a single project

Posted Dec 1, 2010 11:58 UTC (Wed) by jlayton (subscriber, #31672)
In reply to: The kernel and the C library as a single project by rleigh
Parent article: The kernel and the C library as a single project

Hear hear!

This is the sanest idea yet. Sounds simple (in principle) to break the syscall interfaces out of libc and into a separate lib. libc could then be built with dependencies on the new library, thereby maintaining backward compatability.

I'm sure there are all sorts of nasty details I haven't considered, but it sounds like a step in the right direction.

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The kernel and the C library as a single project

Posted Dec 4, 2010 0:24 UTC (Sat) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

And if it would be a real dynamic library (instead a kernel emulated one), intercepting file system calls would be much easier. Currently libc functions can internally do all kinds of interesting things, but with syscalls being in a separate library they could simply be cought with an LD_PRELOAD...

(And the other alternative for interception, ptrace(), changes signaling semantics and race-free interception of calls in threaded code with ptrace() needs architecture specific code.)