• Nicolas Pitre's avatar
    [ARM] 3105/4: ARM EABI: new syscall entry convention · 3f2829a3
    Nicolas Pitre authored
    Patch from Nicolas Pitre
    
    For a while we wanted to change the way syscalls were called on ARM.
    Instead of encoding the syscall number in the swi instruction which
    requires reading back the instruction from memory to extract that number
    and polluting the data cache, it was decided that simply storing the
    syscall number into r7 would be more efficient. Since this represents
    an ABI change then making that change at the same time as EABI support
    is the right thing to do.
    
    It is now expected that EABI user space binaries put the syscall number
    into r7 and use "swi 0" to call the kernel. Syscall register argument
    are also expected to have "EABI arrangement" i.e. 64-bit arguments
    should be put in a pair of registers from an even register number.
    
    Example with long ftruncate64(unsigned int fd, loff_t length):
    
    	legacy ABI:
    	- put fd into r0
    	- put length into r1-r2
    	- use "swi #(0x900000 + 194)" to call the kernel
    
    	new ARM EABI:
    	- put fd into r0
    	- put length into r2-r3 (skipping over r1)
    	- put 194 into r7
    	- use "swi 0" to call the kernel
    
    Note that it is important to use 0 for the swi argument as backward
    compatibility with legacy ABI user space relies on this.
    The syscall macros in asm-arm/unistd.h were also updated to support
    both ABIs and implement the right call method automatically.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarNicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRussell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
    3f2829a3
unistd.h 22 KB