Mechanism of clipboard of xwindow

Question

Can anybody explain the mechanism of clipboard of xwindow to me? For example, if I make a operation of open a file from gedit and copy the content of this file using ctrl+c. And then I open vim and use ctrl+v to paste the content into the new opened file. I know that it will use the buffer of xwindow to store the content. But I am curious how it works in the system level. More specifically, how the underlying linux kernel needs to do to handle this copy-paste operation? Is there any system call related to this operation? Thanks

Answer 1

Everything you could possibly want to know about X selections but were afraid to ask.