in general, we aim to always include the header that's declaring a
function before defining it so that the compiler can check that
prototypes match.
additionally, the internal syscall.h declares __syscall_ret with a
visibility attribute to improve code generation for shared libc (to
prevent gratuitous GOT-register loads). this declaration should be
visible at the point where __syscall_ret is defined, too, or the
inconsistency could theoretically lead to problems at link-time.
the changes to syscall_ret are mostly no-ops in the generated code,
just cleanup of type issues and removal of some implementation-defined
behavior. the one exception is the change in the comparison value,
which is fixed so that 0xf...f000 (which in principle could be a valid
return value for mmap, although probably never in reality) is not
treated as an error return.
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
Szabolcs Nagy