except powerpc, which still lacks inline syscalls simply because
nobody has written the code, these are all fallbacks used to work
around a clang bug that probably does not exist in versions of clang
that can compile musl. however, it's useful to have the generic
non-inline code anyway, as it eases the task of porting to new archs:
writing inline syscall code is now optional. this approach could also
help support compilers which don't understand inline asm or lack
support for the needed register constraints.
mips could not be unified because it has special fixup code for broken
layout of the kernel's struct stat.
the issue at hand is that many syscalls require as an argument the
kernel-ABI size of sigset_t, intended to allow the kernel to switch to
a larger sigset_t in the future. previously, each arch was defining
this size in syscall_arch.h, which was redundant with the definition
of _NSIG in bits/signal.h. as it's used in some not-quite-portable
application code as well, _NSIG is much more likely to be recognized
and understood immediately by someone reading the code, and it's also
shorter and less cluttered.
note that _NSIG is actually 65/129, not 64/128, but the division takes
care of throwing away the off-by-one part.
Rich Felker
Timo Teräs
rofl0r