the mips abi reserves stack space equal to the size of the in-register
args for the callee to save the args, if desired. this would cause the
beginning of the thread structure to be clobbered...
the old code worked in qemu app-level emulation, but not on real
kernels where the clone syscall does not copy the register values to
the new thread. save arguments on the new thread stack instead.
Rich Felker