the old abi was intended to duplicate glibc's abi at the expense of
being ugly and slow, but it turns out glib was not even using that abi
except on non-gcc-compatible compilers (which it doesn't even support)
and was instead using an exceptions-in-c/unwind-based approach whose
abi we could not duplicate anyway without nasty dwarf2/unwind
integration.
the new abi is copied from a very old glibc abi, which seems to still
be supported/present in current glibc. it avoids all unwinding,
whether by sjlj or exceptions, and merely maintains a linked list of
cleanup functions to be called from the context of pthread_exit. i've
made some care to ensure that longjmp out of a cleanup function should
work, even though it is not required to.
this change breaks abi compatibility with programs which were using
pthread cancellation, which is unfortunate, but that's why i'm making
the change now rather than later. considering that most pthread
features have not been usable until recently anyway, i don't see it as
a major issue at this point.
there is a resource limit of 0 bits to store the concurrency level
requested. thus any positive level exceeds a resource limit, resulting
in EAGAIN. :-)
glibc made the ridiculous choice to use pass-by-register calling
convention for these functions, which is impossible to duplicate
directly on non-gcc compilers. instead, we use ugly asm to wrap and
convert the calling convention. presumably this works with every
compiler anyone could potentially want to use.
some of this code should be cleaned up, e.g. using macros for some of
the bit flags, masks, etc. nonetheless, the code is believed to be
working and correct at this point.
note that this presently does not handle consistency of the libc's own
global state during forking. as per POSIX 2008, if the parent process
was threaded, the child process may only call async-signal-safe
functions until one of the exec-family functions is called, so the
current behavior is believed to be conformant even if non-ideal. it
may be improved at some later time.
this allows sys/types.h to provide the pthread types, as required by
POSIX. this design also facilitates forcing ABI-compatible sizes in
the arch-specific alltypes.h, while eliminating the need for
developers changing the internals of the pthread types to poke around
with arch-specific headers they may not be able to test.
Rich Felker