howdy!
plz tell me where i can find information on mechanism of system calls in linux. google has let me down completely and i dont know who to turn to.
thnx in advance!

Hi,
I am willing to answer your question, but i am not sure what information about system calls are you looking. System calls are the calls that the OS provides so that you (as an application) can perform low level operations. They are the interface between the OS and you (application).

What information about system calls do you want? Usually 'man <system-call>' is more than helpful. If you could elaborate further I will try to help.

Hope this helps,

Viral

ok, according to lecture slides of my professor, system calls are of the following types:
1-process control
2-file management
3-device management
4-information maintainence
5-communication

and the methods used to pass parameters to system calls are the following:
1- parameter in register
2- paremeters in table and then pass address of table
3- pushed onto a stack

i have to find the system calls in each category and find which method is used to pass parameters to it. except that im unable to find any such resource where i can get this info. like i said.....google has let me down.

another question:
if i dont have linux installed...is there any way i can access the manual? like is it available online, so i could search for all the system calls?

while i ordinarily HATE schoolwork because just like this the questions are vague and arbitrary. since you don't have Linux to play with i give examples.
In all fairness it is not easy to figure out even if you have the Linux kernel source (which you should get)
you should install Linux on something !

1) sigaction()
2) fcntl()
3) ioctl()
like all school questions the last two are too vague to actually have answers
but i will try but might misunderstand
how do you maintain information ???
4) sysinfo()
and as above what the heck is communication ? interprocess ?
5) pipe()

now you can google