GitLab

clone has some of the quirkiest syscall handling in the kernel, with a
pile of special cases, historical curiosities, and architecture-specific
calling conventions.  In particular, clone with CLONE_SETTLS accepts a
parameter "tls" that the C entry point completely ignores and some
assembly entry points overwrite; instead, the low-level arch-specific
code pulls the tls parameter out of the arch-specific register captured
as part of pt_regs on entry to the kernel.  That's a massive hack, and
it makes the arch-specific code only work when called via the specific
existing syscall entry points; because of this hack, any new clone-like
system call would have to accept an identical tls argument in exactly
the same arch-specific position, rather than providing a unified system
call entry point across architectures.

The first patch allows architectures to handle the tls argument via
normal C parameter passing, if they opt in by selecting
HAVE_COP...