the definition of the IPC_64 macro controls the interface between libc
and the kernel through syscalls; it's not a public API. the meaning is
rather obscure. long ago, Linux's sysvipc *id_ds structures used
16-bit uids/gids and wrong types for a few other fields. this was in
the libc5 era, before glibc. the IPC_64 flag (64 is a misnomer; it's
more like 32) tells the kernel to use the modern[-ish] versions of the
structures.
the definition of IPC_64 has nothing to do with whether the arch is
32- or 64-bit. rather, due to either historical accident or
intentional obnoxiousness, the kernel only accepts and masks off the
0x100 IPC_64 flag conditional on CONFIG_ARCH_WANT_IPC_PARSE_VERSION,
i.e. for archs that want to provide, or that accidentally provided,
both. for archs which don't define this option, no masking is
performed and commands with the 0x100 bit set will fail as invalid. so
ultimately, the definition is just a matter of matching an arbitrary
switch defined per-arch in the kernel.
the vdso symbol lookup code is based on the original 2011 patch by
Nicholas J. Kain, with some streamlining, pointer arithmetic fixes,
and one symbol version matching fix.
on the consumer side (clock_gettime), per-arch macros for the
particular symbol name and version to lookup are added in
syscall_arch.h, and no vdso code is pulled in on archs which do not
define these macros. at this time, vdso is enabled only on x86_64.
the vdso support at the dynamic linker level is no longer useful to
libc, but is left in place for the sake of debuggers (which may need
the vdso in the link map to find its functions) and possibly use with
dlsym.
the issue at hand is that many syscalls require as an argument the
kernel-ABI size of sigset_t, intended to allow the kernel to switch to
a larger sigset_t in the future. previously, each arch was defining
this size in syscall_arch.h, which was redundant with the definition
of _NSIG in bits/signal.h. as it's used in some not-quite-portable
application code as well, _NSIG is much more likely to be recognized
and understood immediately by someone reading the code, and it's also
shorter and less cluttered.
note that _NSIG is actually 65/129, not 64/128, but the division takes
care of throwing away the off-by-one part.
now public syscall.h only exposes __NR_* and SYS_* constants and the
variadic syscall function. no macros or inline functions, no
__syscall_ret or other internal details, no 16-/32-bit legacy syscall
renaming, etc. this logic has all been moved to src/internal/syscall.h
with the arch-specific parts in arch/$(ARCH)/syscall_arch.h, and the
amount of arch-specific stuff has been reduced to a minimum.
changes still need to be reviewed/double-checked. minimal testing on
i386 and mips has already been performed.
Rich Felker
Nathan Zadoks