System calls documentation - where's it at?

[Brooks Davis]

On Tue, Oct 06, 2015 at 03:23:09PM +0100, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
> Sorry for the cross-post but this has remained unanswered in 
> FreeBSD-Questions for a week now:
> 
> =============
> 
> It's probably obvious, but not quite obvious enough for me right now...
> 
> Where's there a list of FreeBSD kernel (system) calls?
> 
> I can't believe I've never needed one before - I guess I've just used 
> UNIX calls (remembered from the 1980s) or got lucky with the manual.
> 
> There's obviously man 2, but you really need to know the name of what 
> you're looking for (or guess from the file names). I could also scan 
> through the 'C' header files.
> 
> The Developer's Manual mentions HOW to call a system call (and told me 
> something shocking about Linux I hadn't realised). But nowhere can I 
> find a list - preferably sorted in to sections with a summary, function 
> number, symbolic name, and list of parameters. I'm looking for something 
> a bit more informative than sys/syscall.h!
> 
> I bet someone's going to refer me to a man page with a name everyone 
> else knows but I couldn't guess. Counting down....

No detailed list exists to my knowledge.

The source of truth is sys/kern/syscalls.master.  Most things have
manpages, but not everything (IMO it is a bug in all cases where there
is no result from "man 2 <syscallname>").

It wouldn't be crazy to use a system like we do for src.conf.5 to
generate a summary page.  Sorting them into groups might be hard and
would require some extra metadata.

-- Brooks
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