What is System Call?

The system call is the fundamental interface between an application and the operating system's kernel. It is a way to requests a service like creating/opening file from the kernel.

1. System calls are not normal method calls. No libraries or header files are supplied by the OS. i.e. stdio.h is not provided by the OS. It's provided by the C/C++ language.

2. Usually System calls are not invoked directly, but rather via wrapper functions in glibc (or perhaps some other library).

3. Input or output parameters to System calls are copied to registers or pushed onto stack.

4. System calls are OS dependent. i.e. Two operating systems may not have same System calls.

Few System calls are as follows:

Process Control - load/execute/create/terminate process etc.

File management - create/delete/open/close/read/write file etc.

Device Management - request/release/read/write devices.

It is not possible to directly link (using any compiler) user-space applications with kernel space. For reasons of security and reliability, user-space applications must not be allowed to directly execute kernel code or manipulate kernel data.


Instead, the kernel must provide a mechanism by which a user-space application can "signal" the kernel that it wishes to invoke a system call. The application can then trap into the kernel through this well-defined mechanism, and execute only code that the kernel allows it to execute. The exact mechanism varies from architecture to architecture.

Typically, System calls are implemented as software interrupt or trap. Nowadays, additional techniques like SYSCALL/SYSENTER, SYSRET/SYSEXIT (the two mechanisms were independently created by AMD and Intel, respectively), is being used.

Generally, System calls are not invoked directly, but rather via wrapper functions in glibc (or perhaps some other library). Why? Because System calls are OS dependent. Making direct System calls from the program will make it non-portable. Instead, we should call wrapper methods/API provided by Standard C/C++ libs.


Let's take an example, you'd like to create a new file and want to write your name to the file. You'll write the following C program:

#include

#include "input.c"

int main(void)

{

char name[64] = "Dew Kumar";

 FILE *playerdata;

playerdata = fopen(name, "W+"); /*create the new file*/

fgets(name,buffer,playerdata); /*write the players name to the file*/

fclose(playerdata); /*close the file*/

}

Here, fopen(), fgets() and fclose() are the library method/API which calls System call to open/write/close files.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_call