this function does not obey the normal calling convention; like a
syscall instruction, it's expected not to clobber any registers except
the return value. clobbering edx could break callers that were reusing
the value cached in edx after the syscall returns.
this doubles the performance of the fastest syscalls on the atom I
tested it on; improvement is reportedly much more dramatic on
worst-case cpus. cannot be used for cancellable syscalls.
this seems to be necessary to make the linker accept the functions in
a shared library (perhaps to generate PLT entries?)
strictly speaking libc-internal asm should not need it. i might clean
that up later.
this commit shuffles around the location of syscall definitions so
that we can make a syscall() library function with both SYS_* and
__NR_* style syscall names available to user applications, provides
the syscall() library function, and optimizes the code that performs
the actual inline syscalls in the library itself.
previously on i386 when built as PIC (shared library), syscalls were
incurring bus lock (lock prefix) overhead at entry and exit, due to
the way the ebx register was being loaded (xchg instruction with a
memory operand). now the xchg takes place between two registers.
further cleanup to arch/$(ARCH)/syscall.h is planned.
Rich Felker