the ABI for arm was silently changed at some point to allow page sizes
other than 4k; traditional binaries built with only 4k-aligned offsets
between load segments cannot run on such systems, but newer binutils
versions use 64k offset alignment.
while larger page size is undesirable for various reasons, users have
encountered hardware and/or kernels that lock the page size to a
larger value, so follow the new ABI and allow it to vary.
this is actually rather ugly, and would get even uglier if we ever
want to support further feature test macros. at some point i may
factor the bits headers into separate files for C base, POSIX base,
and nonstandard extensions (the only distinctions that seem to matter
now) and then the logic for which to include can go in the main header
rather than being duplicated for each arch. the downside of this is
that it would result in more files having to be opened during
compilation, so as long as the ugliness does not grow, i'm inclined to
leave it alone for now.
this port assumes eabi calling conventions, eabi linux syscall
convention, and presence of the kernel helpers at 0xffff0f?0 needed
for threads support. otherwise it makes very few assumptions, and the
code should work even on armv4 without thumb support, as well as on
systems with thumb interworking. the bits headers declare this a
little endian system, but as far as i can tell the code should work
equally well on big endian.
some small details are probably broken; so far, testing has been
limited to qemu/aboriginal linux.
Rich Felker