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.
Nathan Zadoks
Rich Felker