Using Go to Call Unsupported Syscalls

In this talk, we will take a look at what is required to make native syscalls to the operation system through Go. We will cover the basics of what syscalls are and their importance in systems programming and will show off a few small examples before diving into the main topic. This will include mapping syscall numbers to constants and looking at what the syscall itself requires for arguments and converting those C memory layouts into Go. We will go into a number of components in the standard library’s syscall package for converting strings to byte array pointers, etc. and working with the standard library’s unsafe package to access the system’s memory directly. Finally, we’ll put it all together and demonstrate the code with live examples. All code examples will be made available on Github.