Re: Formal description of system call interface

On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Andy Lutomirski [off-list ref] wrote:

On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Dmitry Vyukov [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Hello,

This is notes from the discussion we had at Linux Plumbers this week
regarding providing a formal description of system calls (user API).

The idea come up in the context of syzkaller, syscall fuzzer, which
has descriptions for 1000+ syscalls mostly concentrating on types of
arguments and return values. However, problems are that a small group
of people can't write descriptions for all syscalls; can't keep them
up-to-date and doesn't have necessary domain expertise to do correct
descriptions in some cases.

We identified a surprisingly large number of potential users for such
descriptions:

Let me add one more: consolidation of all the incompatible arch
syscall tables.  A sufficiently descriptive format should be parseable
at build time to generate the syscall tables.

Hi Andy,

What exactly info do we need for this?

Anything that just requires a bit of info per syscall looks like the
lowest hanging fruit
(as compared to info per every ioctl discrimination, and complete args
description).