Where can I find system call source code?

You'll need the Linux kernel sources in order to see the actual source of the system calls. Manual pages, if installed on your local system, only contain the documentation of the calls and not their source itself.

Unfortunately for you, system calls aren't stored in just one particular location in the whole kernel tree. This is because various system calls can refer to different parts of the system (process management, filesystem management, etc.) and therefore it would be infeasible to store them apart from the part of the tree related to that particular part of the system.

The best thing you can do is look for the SYSCALL_DEFINE[0-6] macro. It is used (obviously) to define the given block of code as a system call. For example, fs/ioctl.c has the following code :

SYSCALL_DEFINE3(ioctl, unsigned int, fd, unsigned int, cmd, unsigned long, arg)
{
/* do freaky ioctl stuff */
}

Such a definition means that the ioctl syscall is declared and takes three arguments. The number next to the SYSCALL_DEFINE means the number of arguments. For example, in the case of getpid(void), declared in kernel/timer.c, we have the following code :

SYSCALL_DEFINE0(getpid)
{
        return task_tgid_vnr(current);
}

Hope that clears things up a little.


From an application's point of view, a system call is an elementary and atomic operation done by the kernel.

The Assembly Howto explains what is happening, in terms of machine instruction.

Of course, the kernel is doing a lot of things when handling a syscall.

Actually, you almost could believe that the entire kernel code is devoted to handle all system calls (this is not entirely true, but almost; from applications' point of view, the kernel is only visible thru system calls). The other answer by Daniel Kamil Kozar is explaining what kernel function is starting the handling of some system call (but very often, many other parts of the kernel indirectly participate to system calls; for example, the scheduler participates indirectly into implementing fork because it manages the child process created by a successful fork syscall).