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This is really great resource, didn't know about it. But one question not related to the website above - why the syscalls vary per architecture if the linux API is the same?

Or is it I am confusing it with the C standard library/POSIX and assuming that it should be the same everywhere?

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The Linux kernel API is the same everywhere, but the syscall ABI (numbers, calling convention, entry paths) is specific to a architecture, while it's the C library that wraps those details into the portable POSIX API we code against

Also newer archs (riscv) don't support certain syscalls (open, fork) they are still functions you can call under your standard musl,glibc but they inernally call openat, clone.

I see, but why were they numbered differently? Why not use the same numbers?

As far as I know, the numbers were assigned independently by each port's developers in the 90s as they added calls in their own order. Then it became a frozen ABI nobody could ever renumber, and couldn't have been identical anyway since arches need different syscall variants for things like 32bit vs 64bit types

There are also a couple of syscalls which are truly architecture-specific - like iopl(), which is x86-only. (It controls access to the IN/OUT instructions, so it's not applicable anywhere else.)

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