the motivation for this change is that the extra declaration (with or
without visibility) using "struct _IO_FILE" instead of "FILE" seems to
trigger a bug in gcc 3.x where it considers the types mismatched.
however, this change also results in slightly better code and it is
valid because (1) these three objects are constant, and (2) applying
the & operator to any of them is invalid C, since they are not even
specified to be objects. thus it does not matter if the application
and libc see different addresses for them, as long as the (initial,
unchanging) value is seen the same by both.
this is implemented via the build system and does not affect source
files. the idea is to use protected or hidden visibility to prevent
the compiler from pessimizing function calls within a shared (or
position-independent static) libc in the form of overhead setting up
for a call through the PLT. the ld-time symbol binding via the
-Bsymbolic-functions option already optimized out the PLT itself, but
not the code in the caller needed to support a call through the PLT.
on some archs this overhead can be substantial; on others it's
trivial.
