Rich Felker
22e5bbd0de
this is the first part of a series of patches intended to make __syscall fully self-contained in the object file produced using syscall.h, which will make it possible for crt1 code to perform syscalls. the (confusingly named) i386 __vsyscall mechanism, which this commit removes, was introduced before the presence of a valid thread pointer was mandatory; back then the thread pointer was setup lazily only if threads were used. the intent was to be able to perform syscalls using the kernel's fast entry point in the VDSO, which can use the sysenter (Intel) or syscall (AMD) instruction instead of int $128, but without inlining an access to the __syscall global at the point of each syscall, which would incur a significant size cost from PIC setup everywhere. the mechanism also shuffled registers/calling convention around to avoid spills of call-saved registers, and to avoid allocating ebx or ebp via asm constraints, since there are plenty of broken-but-supported compiler versions which are incapable of allocating ebx with -fPIC or ebp with -fno-omit-frame-pointer. the new mechanism preserves the properties of avoiding spills and avoiding allocation of ebx/ebp in constraints, but does it inline, using some fairly simple register shuffling, and uses a field of the thread structure rather than global data for the vdso-provided syscall code address. for now, the external __syscall function is refactored not to use the old __vsyscall so it can be kept, but the intent is to remove it too.
musl libc
musl, pronounced like the word "mussel", is an MIT-licensed
implementation of the standard C library targetting the Linux syscall
API, suitable for use in a wide range of deployment environments. musl
offers efficient static and dynamic linking support, lightweight code
and low runtime overhead, strong fail-safe guarantees under correct
usage, and correctness in the sense of standards conformance and
safety. musl is built on the principle that these goals are best
achieved through simple code that is easy to understand and maintain.
The 1.1 release series for musl features coverage for all interfaces
defined in ISO C99 and POSIX 2008 base, along with a number of
non-standardized interfaces for compatibility with Linux, BSD, and
glibc functionality.
For basic installation instructions, see the included INSTALL file.
Information on full musl-targeted compiler toolchains, system
bootstrapping, and Linux distributions built on musl can be found on
the project website:
http://www.musl-libc.org/