Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Sat, 15 Jan 2000 17:36:41 -0800 (PST) | | From | Robert Dinse <> | | Subject | Re: Man - was: Re: Big Swap... |
| |
On Sun, 16 Jan 2000, Guest section DW wrote: > > > > The usefulness in distinquishing the two is that you know whether to look > > at the libs or the kernel if a problem exists. > > No. There is no such distinction. > > I guess that your question is inspired by this getpagesize() business, > so take that as example. > > First of all, you can test using strace whether something leads to a syscall > or not. In the case of getpagesize() that depends on the architecture, and > on the libc version, and on whether the program was compiled statically. > (Usually [g]libc thinks it knows the answer itself, and hence does not > use a system call, except possibly in the case of a Sparc under > glibc, where the system call getpagesize() may be used. If the program > was a dynamic ELF program then pagesize is derived by the ELF loader. > On some systems sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE) is used.) > > You see - system call? Or not? Depends on a dozen other things. > There is no clear-cut distinction. > It so happens that the man page is in man2. There is no better place.
I won't lie and say it makes sense to me, why it's implimented as a system call on one architecture, library function on another, etc, and why there is no distinction.
From my vantage point it would just seem to make troubleshooting a real bitch.
Kernel is maintained by one group of people, libc by another. Now it is less of a mystery to me why there are so many conflicts and things out of sync.
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
|  |