these are presently extensions, thus named with _np to match glibc and
other implementations that provide them; however they are likely to be
standardized in the future without the _np suffix as a result of
Austin Group issue 1208. if so, both names will be kept as aliases.
previously, a common __posix_spawnx backend was used that accepted an
additional argument for the execve variant to call in the child. this
moderately bloated up the posix_spawn function, shuffling arguments
between stack and/or registers to call a 7-argument function from a
6-argument one.
instead, tuck the exec function pointer in an unused part of the
(large) pthread_spawnattr_t structure, and have posix_spawnp duplicate
the attributes and fill in a pointer to __execvpe. the net code size
change is minimal, but the weight is shifted to the "heavier" function
which already pulls in more dependencies.
as a bonus, we get rid of an external symbol (__posix_spawnx) that had
no really good place for a declaration because it shouldn't have
existed to begin with.
the bit is reserved anyway for ABI-compat reasons; this documents it
and makes it so we can have posix_spawnattr_setflags check for flag
validity without hard-coding an anonymous bit value.
linux's sched_* syscalls actually implement the TPS (thread
scheduling) functionality, not the PS (process scheduling)
functionality which the sched_* functions are supposed to have.
omitting support for the PS option (and having the sched_* interfaces
fail with ENOSYS rather than omitting them, since some broken software
assumes they exist) seems to be the only conforming way to do this on
linux.
to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99
compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined
appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form
[restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the
original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
Rich Felker