[TUHS] Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!

Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Sun Feb 4 11:14:30 AEST 2018


On Sat, Feb 3, 2018 at 5:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Andy Kosela wrote:
>
>> Linux and FreeBSD are now two monstrous trolls, bloated and extremely
>> complex and large.
>>
>
> Looking through /usr/include/***.h, I see:
>
> FreeBSD 10.4:   #define SYS_MAXSYSCALL  548
> MacOS Sierra:   #define SYS_MAXSYSCALL  522
> Debian 8.10:    I don't know where the Penguins have hidden it...


Part of the reason for the bloat is that newer syscalls replace older ones
(with the option for keeping the older one around for compat). So, open
becomes openat (since the latter is more expressive). Also, over time,
different data types grow to allow, for example, larger than 2G files,
which has a big ripple effect on lots of system calls. But looking now, a
lot are due to MAC and ACL functions (well, 30). There's 80 'at' system
calls (though some are in the ~150 obsolete list)... So it isn't as utterly
horrific as it might sound, but it's still pretty bad. (There's 400
defined, with 20 of those being for prior versions of the OS).

Warner
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