3 ms·

Sorry, yes, I misunderstood the comment. AFAICT, SunOS (Solaris), BSD, and Darwin have stable kernel ABIs for the core (UNIX) system calls. I've never used the

by titzer 5y ago

Sorry, yes, I misunderstood the comment. AFAICT, SunOS (Solaris), BSD, and Darwin have stable kernel ABIs for the core (UNIX) system calls. I've never used the Mach syscalls on Darwin, but I can imagine those changing more often, because Apple does that. I would imagine that Windows supports 32-bit syscalls still pretty well...but I stopped using Windows in 2002, so tbh, not sure.

saagarjha 5y ago
read is unlikely to change anytime soon on macOS but Apple can and does change its numbering for lesser-used but still very important system calls all the time.
- masklinn 5y ago
  They also change the syscall abi without touching the numbering. gettimeofday(2) is a pretty famous one there. Then there’s also the Linux-specific issue of vDSO, which are not kernel code and to which the article applies in full (see: “debugging an evil ho runtime bug”).
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
I have a very different understanding of the situation; the best description of the situation I can find is https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/Go116OpenBSDUsesLibc https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/Go116Op... (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997506 ) - from that article, > The official API for Illumos and Solaris system calls requires you to use their C library, and OpenBSD wants you to do this as well for security reasons (for OpenBSD system call origin verification). Go has used the C library on Solaris and Illumos for a long time, but through Go 1.15 it made direct system calls on OpenBSD and so current released versions of OpenBSD had a special exemption from their system call origin verification because of it.
plorkyeran 5y ago
Darwin has always explicitly not had a stable kernel ABI (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1118/_index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1118/_index...). Go tried to bypass the system libraries on macOS and it resulted in things breaking, so now they do use system libraries (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/17490 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/17490).

by titzer 5y ago

saagarjha 5y ago

read is unlikely to change anytime soon on macOS but Apple can and does change its numbering for lesser-used but still very important system calls all the time.

masklinn 5y ago
They also change the syscall abi without touching the numbering. gettimeofday(2) is a pretty famous one there. Then there’s also the Linux-specific issue of vDSO, which are not kernel code and to which the article applies in full (see: “debugging an evil ho runtime bug”).

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

I have a very different understanding of the situation; the best description of the situation I can find is https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/Go116OpenBSDUsesLibc https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/Go116Op... (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997506 ) - from that article, > The official API for Illumos and Solaris system calls requires you to use their C library, and OpenBSD wants you to do this as well for security reasons (for OpenBSD system call origin verification). Go has used the C library on Solaris and Illumos for a long time, but through Go 1.15 it made direct system calls on OpenBSD and so current released versions of OpenBSD had a special exemption from their system call origin verification because of it.

plorkyeran 5y ago

Darwin has always explicitly not had a stable kernel ABI (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1118/_index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1118/_index...). Go tried to bypass the system libraries on macOS and it resulted in things breaking, so now they do use system libraries (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/17490 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/17490).