Re: [PATCH RFA] procfs.c related changes for AIX 5

Eli Zaretskii
2001-03-06T01:11:00Z

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Kevin Buettner wrote:

> 2) AIX5 does not have a static set of syscalls. Consequently, there
> is no sys/syscall.h file which provides a nice mapping of
> symbolic names to syscall numbers. Instead, AIX5 provides
> /proc/PID/sysent which contains the information necessary to map
> strings to syscall numbers.
>
> These syscall numbers are guaranteed (at least according to the
> developer that I spoke with) to be fixed for the lifetime of a
> process, but they can certainly vary between processes.

Won't this cause problems with debugging syscall-related code, since
the values for GDB and the debuggee may be different?

> The changes needed to the code due to this change were fairly
> significant:
>
> a) sysset_t data structures (or data structures which contain
> sysset_t) must be dynamically allocated. They must be
> copied with memcpy() and explicitly freed when no longer
> needed.
>
> b) Comparisons against SYS_* constants no longer work. I've
> introduced a number of predicate functions (such as
> syscall_is_exit()) which will indicate whether a
> given system call number is a particular system call. All code
> which formerly relied on comparisons against a system call
> number was rewritten to call one of these new predicate
> functions instead.

Shouldn't these be documented somehow in gdbint.texinfo?