Interesting list! I was actually surprised that the VDSO [1] page was missing from that. For those unfamiliar... the Linux kernel selects the best system call

Interesting list! I was actually surprised that the VDSO [1] page was missing from that. For those unfamiliar... the Linux kernel selects the best system call implementation for the current system and exports a special page to user-space. It also provides a few specific additional routines (generally related to getting the current time without having to jump in and out of the kernel). I'm not advocating for this approach, but it's there and can have a big impact. As a fun exercise, I just checked how much impact this has on my VM right now... timetest.c: #include <stdio.h> #include <time.h> int main(void) { for (int i = 0; i < 1000000000; i++) { time(NULL); } } gcc timetest.c -o timetest -std=c99 && time ./timetest real 0m3.589s user 0m3.588s sys 0m0.000s gcc timetest.c -o timetest -std=c99 -static && time ./timetest real 0m41.436s user 0m16.900s sys 0m24.456s [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSO