after fork, we have a new process and the pid is equal to the tid of
the new main thread. there is no need to make two separate syscalls to
obtain the same number.
we can do this without violating the namespace now that they are
macros/inline functions rather than extern functions. the motivation
is that gcc was generating giant, slow, horrible code for the old
functions, and now generates a single byte-swapping instruction.
the basic idea is that the only things in alltypes.h should be types
that either vary from system to system (in practice, not just in
theoretical la-la land - this is the implementation so we choose what
constraints we want to impose on ports) or which are needed by
multiple system headers.
1. saved errno was not being restored, illegally clearing errno to 0.
2. no need to backup and save errno around free; it will not touch
except perhaps when the program has already invoked UB...
actually FLT_ROUNDS needs to expand to a static inline function that
obtains the current rounding mode and returns it, but that will be
added later with fenv.h stuff.
according to posix, readv "shall be equivalent to read(), except..."
that it places the data into the buffers specified by the iov array.
however on linux, when reading from a terminal, each iov element
behaves almost like a separate read. this means that if the first iov
exactly satisfied the request (e.g. a length-one read of '\n') and the
second iov is nonzero length, the syscall will block again after
getting the blank line from the terminal until another line is read.
simply put, entering a single blank line becomes impossible.
the solution, fortunately, is simple. whenever the buffer size is
nonzero, reduce the length of the requested read by one byte and let
the last byte go through the buffer. this way, readv will already be
in the second (and last) iov, and won't re-block on the second iov.
POSIX clearly specifies the type of msg_iovlen and msg_controllen, and
Linux ignores it and makes them both size_t instead. to work around
this we add padding (instead of just using the wrong types like glibc
does), but we also need to patch-up the struct before passing it to
the kernel in case the caller did not zero-fill it.
if i could trust the kernel to just ignore the upper 32 bits, this
would not be necessary, but i don't think it will ignore them...
previously NULL was returned in ai_canonname, resulting in crashes in
some callers. this behavior was incorrect. note however that the new
behavior differs from glibc, which performs reverse dns lookups. POSIX
is very clear that a reverse DNS lookup must not be performed for
numeric addresses.
this is something of a tradeoff, as now set*id() functions, rather
than pthread_create, are what pull in the code overhead for dealing
with linux's refusal to implement proper POSIX thread-vs-process
semantics. my motivations are:
1. it's cleaner this way, especially cleaner to optimize out the
rsyscall locking overhead from pthread_create when it's not needed.
2. it's expected that only a tiny number of core system programs will
ever use set*id() functions, whereas many programs may want to use
threads, and making thread overhead tiny is an incentive for "light"
programs to try threads.
Rich Felker