microblaze: clone syscall: Potentially ABI breaking by passing parent/child_tidptr - old glibc 2.3.6.

Hi All,

We have updated our toolchain to the latest & greatest based on an eglibc with ntpl for microblaze. And I would like to check one thing with you to be sure that we don't break ABI compatibility.

In current kernel code (without ntpl), kernel sys_clone wrapper(in entry.S) clears 2 arguments (or setup them to NULL) which is parent_tidptr and child_tidptr.
Obviously we have to use these two parameters to get things to work on eglibc that's why I have to remove that clearing.

I have looked at the kernel code(fork.c and core.c files) and I haven't found any reason why passing parent_tidptr and child_tidptr from glibc and not to clearing them in the kernel should break old glibc toolchain and break ABI.

For old glibc if clone_flags is setup to (CLONE_PARENT_SETTID | CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID | CLONE_CHILD_SETTID) to get parent/child_tidptr use in the kernel (but both are NULL).
From code I have seen it always ends with unsuccessful attempt to return value back to user space because kernel ignores return values from put_user macros (It also means that put_user fails because pointer is NULL).
For new case(with passing parent/child_tidptr) from old glibc, kernel will just do what it is expected to do which is setup/clear proper values to provided pointers.

Also from man page if I compare both cases (with setup pointers to NULL and passing them from glibc) kernel will setup/clear thread ID to proper location prepared by glibc.

My point is if there is any option if we start to pass parent/child_tidptr for old glibc that it will break anything.

Can you correct my understanding?

Thanks,
Michal

Michal Simek, Ing. (M.Eng)
w: www.monstr.eu p: +42-0-721842854
Maintainer of Linux kernel 2.6 Microblaze Linux - http://www.monstr.eu/fdt/
Microblaze U-BOOT custodian