Re: Official Linux system wrapper library?

* Daniel Colascione:

On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 12:17 AM, Willy Tarreau [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 07:55:30AM +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:

quoted

[1] https://sourceware.org/

Bah, after all, this

wipes quite a bit of the shame I feel every time I do something to

bypass it :-/


The sad thing is that the energy wasted arguing in the bug above could

have been better spent designing and implementing a generic solution

to expose syscalls without depending on glibc's politics anymore.


Willy

bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6399 is a

quoted

    longstanding example.

This one was a sad read and shows that applications will continue to
suffer from glibc's prehistorical view on operating systems

Yes. I'm really not sure what glibc's current policies are meant to
accomplish. They don't serve any useful purpose. There seems to be
this weird subtext that glibc has leverage to change OS design, and it
really doesn't. It's a misplaced idealism and ends up just hurting
everyone.

I'm not sure what this comment tries to accomplish.

glibc tries to serve many masters: Current and past Linux kernel
interfaces, current Hurd kernel interfaces, different versions of POSIX
and C (and even C++), current C/C++ programming practice, historic C
programming practice, current and historic Linux userspace programming,
various platform ABIs, just to name a few.

These requirements are often in conflict.

quoted

Seeing comments suggesting an application should open
/proc/$PID makes me really wonder if people actually want to use slow
and insecure applications designed this way.

That's a separate point. Yes, gettid should have a wrapper, but *also*
we should have an FD-based interface to processes, because outside
specialized contexts (e.g., parent-child waiting), the traditional
Unix process API really is impossible to use safely. But that's a
separate ongoing discussion.

A descriptor-based API would not help glibc that much because there is
an expectation encoded into many C programs that the C library does not
keep permanently open descriptors for its own internal use.

Thanks,
Florian