this was added so that posix_spawn and possibly other functionality
could be implemented in terms of vfork, but that turned out to be
unsafe. any such usage needs __clone with proper handling of stack
lifetime.
nominally the low bits of the trap number on sh are the number of
syscall arguments, but they have never been used by the kernel, and
some code making syscalls does not even know the number of arguments
and needs to pass an arbitrary high number anyway.
sh3/sh4 traditionally used the trap range 16-31 for syscalls, but part
of this range overlapped with hardware exceptions/interrupts on sh2
hardware, so an incompatible range 32-47 was chosen for sh2.
using trap number 31 everywhere, since it's in the existing sh3/sh4
range and does not conflict with sh2 hardware, is a proposed
unification of the kernel syscall convention that will allow binaries
to be shared between sh2 and sh3/sh4. if this is not accepted into the
kernel, we can refit the sh2 target with runtime selection mechanisms
for the trap number, but doing so would be invasive and would entail
non-trivial overhead.
Rich Felker