lr must be saved because init/fini-section code from the compiler
clobbers it. this was not a problem when i tested without gcc's
crtbegin/crtend files present, but with them, musl on arm fails to
work (infinite loop in _init).
looks like nik copied these "extra arguments" from the i386 code.
they're not actually arguments there, just 1-byte instructions to
make sure the stack is aligned to 16 bytes after all the other
arguments are pushed. since each push is 8 bytes on x86_64, they
happened to have no effect here, but their presence is confusing and a
minor waste of space.
it does not work; after further consideration, a separate Scrt1.s for
pie really is essential. it would be nice if the unified approach
worked, but the linker fails to generate the correct PLT entries and
instead puts textrels in the main program, which don't work because
the kernel maps the text read-only.
new Scrt1.s will be committed soon in place of this.
this is mainly in hopes of supporting c++ (not yet possible for other
reasons) but will also help applications/libraries which use (and more
often, abuse) the gcc __attribute__((__constructor__)) feature in "C"
code.
x86_64 and arm versions of the new startup asm are untested and may
have minor problems.
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
Nicholas J. Kain