Question

I am studying about how CPU changes from user mode to kernel mode in linux. I came across two different methods: Interrupts and using sysenter.

I could not understand how sysenter works. Could someone please explain what exactly happens in the cpu when the sysenter instruction is run?

Answer 1

The problem that a program faces when it wants to get into the kernel (aka “making syscalls”) is that user programs cannot access anything kernel-related, yet the program has to somehow switch the CPU into “kernel mode”.

On an interrupt, this is done by the hardware.

It also happens automatically when a (CPU-, not C++) exception occurs, like accessing memory that doesn’t exist, a divison by zero, or invoking a privileged instruction in user code. Or trying to execute an unimplemented instruction. This last thing is actually a decent way to implement a “call the kernel” interface: CPU runs on an instruction that the CPU doesn’t know, so it raises an exception which drops the CPU into kernel mode and into the kernel. The kernel code could then check whether the “correct” unmiplemented instruction was used and perform the syscall stuff if it was, or just kill the process if it was any other unimplemented instruction.

Of course, doing something like this isn’t, well, “clean”. It’s more like a dirty hack, abusing what should be an error to implement a perfectly valid control flow change. Hence, CPUs do tend to have actual instructions to do essentially the same thing, just in a more “defined” way. The main purpose of anything like a “sysenter” instruction is still the same: it changes the CPU into “kernel mode”, saves the position where the “sysenter” was called, and continues execution somewhere in the kernel.

As for the difference between a “software interrupt” and “sysenter”: “sysenter” is specifically optimized for this kind of use case. For example, it doesn’t get the kernel address to call from memory like a (software-)interrupt does, but instead uses a special register to get the address from, which saves the memory address lookup. It might also have additional optimizations internally, based on the fact that software-interrupts might be handled more like interrupts, and the sysenter instruction doesn’t actually need that. I don’t know the precise details of the implementations of these instructions on the CPUs, you would probably have to read the Intel manuals to really get into such details.