On 05/15/2014 07:21 AM, Darren Hart wrote:

On 5/14/14, 17:18, "H. Peter Anvin" [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On 05/14/2014 09:18 AM, Darren Hart wrote:

quoted

However, unless I'm sorely mistaken, the larger problem is that glibc
removed the futex() call entirely, so these man pages don't describe
something users even have access to anymore. I had to revert to calling
the syscalls directly in the futextest test suite because of this:


http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/dvhart/futextest.git/tree/inc
lu
de/futextest.h#n67

This really comes down to the fact that we should have a libinux which
contains the basic system call wrapper machinery for Linux specific
things and nothing else.

syscall(3) is toxic and breaks randomly on some platforms.

Peter Z and I have had a good time discussing this in the past.... And
here it is again. :-)

People have a number of times noted that there are problems
with syscall(), but I'm not knowledgeable on the details.
I'd happily take a patch to the man page (which, for historical
reasons, is actually syscall(2)) that explains the the problems 
(and ideally notes those platforms where there are no problems).

Thanks,

Michael


-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/