What is the difference between the kernel space and the user space?

Question

What is the difference between the kernel space and the user space? Do kernel space, kernel threads, kernel processes and kernel stack mean the same thing? Also, why do we n

Answer 1

The kernel space means a memory space can only be touched by kernel. On 32bit linux it is 1G(from 0xC0000000 to 0xffffffff as virtual memory address).Every process created by kernel is also a kernel thread, So for one process, there are two stacks: one stack in user space for this process and another in kernel space for kernel thread.

the kernel stack occupied 2 pages(8k in 32bit linux), include a task_struct(about 1k) and the real stack(about 7k). The latter is used to store some auto variables or function call params or function address in kernel functions. Here is the code(Processor.h (linux\include\asm-i386)):

#define THREAD_SIZE (2*PAGE_SIZE)
#define alloc_task_struct() ((struct task_struct *) __get_free_pages(GFP_KERNEL,1))
#define free_task_struct(p) free_pages((unsigned long) (p), 1)

__get_free_pages(GFP_KERNEL,1)) means alloc memory as 2^1=2 pages.

But the process stack is another thing, its address is just bellow 0xC0000000(32bit linux), the size of it can be quite bigger, used for the user space function calls.

So here is a question come for system call, it is running in kernel space but was called by process in user space, how does it work? Will linux put its params and function address in kernel stack or process stack? Linux's solution: all system call are triggered by software interruption INT 0x80. Defined in entry.S (linux\arch\i386\kernel), here is some lines for example:

ENTRY(sys_call_table)
.long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_ni_syscall)   /* 0  -  old "setup()" system call*/
.long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_exit)
.long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_fork)
.long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_read)
.long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_write)
.long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_open)     /* 5 */
.long SYMBOL_NAME(sys_close)