ever since inline syscalls were added for (o32) mips in commit
328810d325, the asm has nonsensically
loaded the syscall number, rather than taking $2 as an input
constraint to let the compiler load it. commit
cfc09b1ecf improved on this somewhat by
allowing a constant syscall number to propagate into an immediate, but
missed that the whole operation made no sense.
now, only $4, $5, $6, $8, and $9 are potential input-only registers.
$2 is always input and output, and $7 is both when it's an argument,
otherwise output-only. previously, $7 was treated as an input (with a
"1" constraint matching its output position) even when it was not an
input, which was arguably undefined behavior (asm input from
indeterminate value). this is corrected.
this patch is not purely non-functional changes, since before, $8 and
$9 were wrongly in the clobberlist for syscalls with fewer than 5 or 6
arguments. of course it's impossible for syscalls to have different
clobbers depending on their number of arguments. the clobberlist for
the recently-added 5- and 6-argument forms was correct, and for the 0-
to 4-argument forms was erroneously copied from the mips o32 ABI where
the additional arguments had to be passed on the stack.
in making this change, I reviewed the kernel sources, and $8 and $9
are always saved for 64-bit kernels since they're part of the syscall
argument list for n32 and n64 ABIs.
n32 and n64 ABIs add new argument registers vs o32, so that passing on
the stack is not necessary, so it's not clear why the 5- and
6-argument versions were special-cased to begin with; it seems to have
been pattern-copying from arch/mips (o32).
i've treated the new argument registers like the first 4 in terms of
clobber status (non-clobbered). hopefully this is correct.
at one point, clang reportedly failed to support the asm register
constraints needed for inline syscalls. versions of clang that old
have much bigger problems that preclude using them to compile musl
libc.
mips64 requires 'struct stat' conversion due to incorrect 32-bit
fields where time_t should be in the kernel version of the structure.
syscall_arch.h already performed the correct translation for stat,
fstat, and lstat syscalls, but omitted special handling for fstatat.
Rich Felker