Al,
I see that you did some consolidating work for clone() in Linux 3.8,
and for that reason I suspect you know the answer to the questions
below. Could you take a short moment to look at the questions?
The relevant pieces of the clone(2) man page are quoted below. There
is some ancient text there that talks about the "struct pt_regs *regs"
argument. In 3.8, I see that you made changes that make mention of
that argument (even more?) obsolete, replacing it with 'tls_val'. In
any case, the page never actually explained the purpose of the
argument, and I do not know the past or present details.
Would you be able to help with the following:
* Provide a short explanation of the purpose of the 'tls_val' argument.
* Was the mention of "struct pt_regs *regs" already long obsolete, or
did it only become obsolete in 3.8? (I suspect the former.) In any
case, (if it makes sense to do so)would you be able to make some short
explanation of that argument, and also some statement about when it
became obsolete? (This is relevant, because man pages tries not to
document just current behavior but also the details in past kernel
versions.)
I'll try to work in whatever text you give me as part of the man page.
Thanks,
Michael
NAME
clone, __clone2 - create a child process
SYNOPSIS
/* Prototype for the glibc wrapper function */
#include <sched.h>
int clone(int (*fn)(void *), void *child_stack,
int flags, void *arg, ...
/* pid_t *ptid, struct user_desc *tls, pid_t *ctid */ );
/* Prototype for the raw system call */
long clone(unsigned long flags, void *child_stack,
void *ptid, void *ctid,
struct pt_regs *regs);
DESCRIPTION
clone() creates a new process, in a manner similar to fork(2).
This page describes both the glibc clone() wrapper function and
the underlying system call on which it is based. The main text
describes the wrapper function; the differences for the raw system
call are described toward the end of this page.
[...]
The raw system call interface
The raw clone() system call corresponds more closely to fork(2) in
that execution in the child continues from the point of the call.
As such, the fn and arg arguments of the clone() wrapper function
are omitted. Furthermore, the argument order changes. The raw
system call interface on x86 and many other architectures is
roughly:
long clone(unsigned long flags, void *child_stack,
void *ptid, void *ctid,
struct pt_regs *regs);
Another difference for the raw system call is that the child_stack
argument may be zero, in which case copy-on-write semantics ensure
that the child gets separate copies of stack pages when either
process modifies the stack. In this case, for correct operation,
the CLONE_VM option should not be specified.
For some architectures, the order of the arguments for the system
call differs from that shown above. On the score, microblaze,
ARM, ARM 64, PA-RISC, arc, Power PC, xtensa, and MIPS architec‐
tures, the order of the fourth and fifth arguments is reversed.
On the cris and s390 architectures, the order of the first and
second arguments is reversed.
clone2()
On ia64, a different interface is used:
int __clone2(int (*fn)(void *),
void *child_stack_base, size_t stack_size,
int flags, void *arg, ...
/* pid_t *ptid, struct user_desc *tls, pid_t *ctid */ );
The prototype shown above is for the glibc wrapper function; the
raw system call interface has no fn or arg argument, and changes
the order of the arguments so that flags is the first argument,
and tls is the last argument.
__clone2() operates in the same way as clone(), except that
child_stack_base points to the lowest address of the child's stack
area, and stack_size specifies the size of the stack pointed to by
child_stack_base.