this implementation is superior to the glibc/nptl implementation, in
that it gives true realtime behavior. there is no risk of timer
expiration events being lost due to failed thread creation or failed
malloc, because the thread is created as time creation time, and
reused until the timer is deleted.
multiple opens of the same named semaphore must return the same
pointer, and only the last close can unmap it. thus the ugly global
state keeping track of mappings. the maximum number of distinct named
semaphores that can be opened is limited sufficiently small that the
linear searches take trivial time, especially compared to the syscall
overhead of these functions.
