Operating systems offer processes running in User Mode a set of interfaces to interact with hardware devices such as the CPU, disks, and printers. Putting an extra layer between the application and the hardware has several advantages. First, it makes programming easier by freeing users from studying low-level programming characteristics of hardware devices. Second, it greatly increases system security, because the kernel can check the accuracy of the request at the interface level before attempting to satisfy it. Last but not least, these interfaces make programs more portable, because they can be compiled and executed correctly on every kernel that offers the same set of interfaces.

Unix systems implement most interfaces between User Mode processes and hardware devices by means of system calls issued to the kernel. This chapter examines in detail how Linux implements system calls that User Mode programs issue to the kernel.