The problem is that syscall.ph doesn't understand what you are trying to do with $f. Perl is passing a GLOB to syscall but it is not getting converted to an address. That is why your output prints "GLOB(0x814".

Note that h2ph ( and thus, syscall.ph )does not claim to handle all structures correctly.

From man h2ph:
" It (h2ph) doesn't handle all C constructs, but it does attempt to isolate definitions inside evals so that you can get at the definitions that it can translate. It's only intended as a rough tool. You may need to dicker with the files produced."

If your read your data into a buffer and pass the buffer then SYS_write works correctly.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
require 'sys/syscall.ph';

my $file = 'foobar';
my $buffer;

open my $f, '<', \$file or die "open: $!";
defined read($f, $buffer, 10) or die "read: $!";
syscall(&SYS_write, fileno(STDERR), $buffer, 10) != -1 or warn "write:
+ $!";
print STDERR "\n";
defined read($f, $buffer, 1) or die "read: $!";
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