MAD24-315 Rethinking the kernel system call entry

• Thursday, 16 May 11:35 - 12:00
• Room: Session 2 | Tenerife I

The kernel currently contains two different ways of generating system call tables across architectures, with bits of it abstracted by rather complicated macros that are universally hated and that that occasionally run into dangerous corner cases when they are wrong. Arnd is working on a rewrite of this code to end up with a version using generated code to make this consistent across all architectures. The resulting infrastructure will allow correct argument sanitation for compat syscalls for architectures that support 32-bit compat binaries, At the same time describing system calls enough to have the user space side generated from the same description, which can be used by things like the C library, debugger or tracing in userspace. Adding a new system call should become a matter of editing a single file, and it will be easier to add support for additional ABIs such as 128-bit pointer userspace coexisting with the current 32-bit and 64-bit binaries.

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