This library enables any Lisp, as long as supported by CFFI, to invoke system calls through a low-level foreign function interface.

⚠ Note: Only these OS and architectures are supported at the moment:

• linux-x86_64
• linux-aarch64
• macos-aarch64

Installation

To install syscall, you can use Quicklisp:

(ql:quickload "syscall")

The C shared libraries are bundled with the source distributed and will be loaded during the evaluation of (ql:quickload "syscall").

Usage

Here is a basic example of how to use syscall on Linux x86-64 platform:

(sc:syscall syscall.constants:+GETPID+) ;; getpid

This will show you the current Lisp process's PID.

sc:syscall can take up to six arguments to the system call; alternatively, you may explicitly use these APIs if preferred, where sc:syscallN denotes that N arguments shall be passed to a system call:

• sc:syscall0
• sc:syscall1
• sc:syscall2
• sc:syscall3
• sc:syscall4
• sc:syscall5
• sc:syscall6

Argument types and the return type

syscall and the variants only takes and return unsigned machine integer(s), so it is the caller's responsibility to:

1. carefully convert all arguments to unsigned machine integers ((unsigned-byte 64))
2. interpret the returned unsigned machine integer

syscall.constants package

For convenience, a set of system call numbers were parsed as constants in advance for all supported platforms. See src/platform/your-platform/constants.lisp and gen-platform-constants.lisp for more details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please submit a pull request or open an issue on GitHub.

License

syscall is licensed under the MIT License.