Syscalls in Xous

Syscalls enable communication between processes, as well as communication to the kernel. These are guaranteed to never change, but new syscalls may be added.

Syscalls may take up to seven usize -bit arguments, and may return up to seven usize -bit output operands, plus a tag indicating success or failure. The size of usize may vary depending on processor type, and is always the width of a pointer.

Syscall Representation

Depending on the platform, syscalls will have varying representation.

Syscalls on RISC-V

RISC-V specifies eight registers as argument registers: $a0 - $a7 . When performing a syscall, the following convention is used:

Register	Usage (Calling)
a0	Syscall Number
a1	Arg 1
a2	Arg 2
a3	Arg 3
a4	Arg 4
a5	Arg 5
a6	Arg 6
a7	Arg 7

When returning from the syscall, these registers have the following meaning:

Register	Usage (Return)
a0	Return type tag
a1	Arg 1
a2	Arg 2
a3	Arg 3
a4	Arg 4
a5	Arg 5
a6	Arg 6
a7	Arg 7

Note that this means that there is a hard limit on the number of arguments that can be passed. Additionally, the RISC-V calling convention specifies that only $a0 and $a1 may be used to return values. Xous expands this to allow eight return values, which currently requires an assembly shim.

Syscalls on `std`

When built for Rust's std library, syscalls are sent via a network connection. Because pointers are unsafe to send, usize is defined on std as being 32-bits. Additionally, most syscalls will return NotImplemented.

Messages may be passed, however the contents of memory must be present on the wire.

Offset (Bytes)	Usage (Calling)
0	Syscall Number
4	Arg 1
8	Arg 2
12	Arg 3
16	Arg 4
20	Arg 5
24	Arg 6
28	Arg 7
32	Contents of any buffer pointed to by args

When returning, a memory buffer may be required. The contents of this buffer will be appended to the network packet in the same manner as the calling buffer.

Offset (Bytes)	Usage (Return)
0	Return type tag
4	Arg 1
8	Arg 2
12	Arg 3
16	Arg 4
20	Arg 5
24	Arg 6
28	Arg 7
32	Contents of any returned buffer

Syscall Types

Syscalls use specialized types, many of which are backed by usize. For example, a MemoryAddress is a NoneZeroUsize, which is the same size as usize. In this manner, programs can ensure that memory addresses cannot be NULL.

Syscall Support Types

System calls are all tagged enums. Syscalls may not be made from within an interrupt context, unless the name ends in I, for example ReturnToParentI.

All syscalls contain a maximum of seven words (usize) of data, giving a total of eight words including the tag.

pub type MemoryAddress = NonZeroUsize;
pub type MemorySize = NonZeroUsize;
pub type StackPointer = usize;
pub type MessageId = usize;

pub type PID = u8;
pub type MessageSender = usize;
pub type Connection = usize;

/// Server ID
pub type SID = (usize, usize, usize, usize);

/// Connection ID
pub type CID = usize;

/// Thread ID
pub type ThreadID = usize;

/// Equivalent to a RISC-V Hart ID
pub type CpuID = usize;

pub struct MemoryRange {
    pub addr: MemoryAddress,
    pub size: MemorySize,
}

List of Syscalls

The list of syscalls is documented in the xous crate, inside syscall.rs.

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