this is the first step in an overhaul aimed at greatly simplifying and optimizing everything dealing with thread-local state. previously, the thread pointer was initialized lazily on first access, or at program startup if stack protector was in use, or at certain random places where inconsistent state could be reached if it were not initialized early. while believed to be fully correct, the logic was fragile and non-obvious. in the first phase of the thread pointer overhaul, support is retained (and in some cases improved) for systems/situation where loading the thread pointer fails, e.g. old kernels. some notes on specific changes: - the confusing use of libc.main_thread as an indicator that the thread pointer is initialized is eliminated in favor of an explicit has_thread_pointer predicate. - sigaction no longer needs to ensure that the thread pointer is initialized before installing a signal handler (this was needed to prevent a situation where the signal handler caused the thread pointer to be initialized and the subsequent sigreturn cleared it again) but it still needs to ensure that implementation-internal thread-related signals are not blocked. - pthread tsd initialization for the main thread is deferred in a new manner to minimize bloat in the static-linked __init_tp code. - pthread_setcancelstate no longer needs special handling for the situation before the thread pointer is initialized. it simply fails on systems that cannot support a thread pointer, which are non-conforming anyway. - pthread_cleanup_push/pop now check for missing thread pointer and nop themselves out in this case, so stdio no longer needs to avoid the cancellable path when the thread pointer is not available. a number of cases remain where certain interfaces may crash if the system does not support a thread pointer. at this point, these should be limited to pthread interfaces, and the number of such cases should be fewer than before.
this is a requirement in the specification that was overlooked.
the va_arg call for the argv[]-terminating null pointer was missing, so this pointer was being wrongly used as the environment pointer. issue reported by Timo Teräs. proposed patch slightly modified to simplify the resulting code.
the trick here is that sigaction can track for us which signals have ever had a signal handler set for them, and only those signals need to be considered for reset. this tracking mask may have false positives, since it is impossible to remove bits from it without race conditions. false negatives are not possible since the mask is updated with atomic operations prior to making the sigaction syscall. implementation-internal signals are set to SIG_IGN rather than SIG_DFL so that a signal raised in the parent (e.g. calling pthread_cancel on the thread executing pthread_spawn) does not have any chance make it to the child, where it would cause spurious termination by signal. this change reduces the minimum/typical number of syscalls in the child from around 70 to 4 (including execve). this should greatly improve the performance of posix_spawn and other interfaces which use it (popen and system). to facilitate these changes, sigismember is also changed to return 0 rather than -1 for invalid signals, and to return the actual status of implementation-internal signals. POSIX allows but does not require an error on invalid signal numbers, and in fact returning an error tends to confuse applications which wrongly assume the return value of sigismember is boolean.
failures prior to the exec attempt were reported correctly, but on exec failure, the return value contained junk.
there are several reasons for this. some of them are related to race conditions that arise since fork is required to be async-signal-safe: if fork or pthread_create is called from a signal handler after the fork syscall has returned but before the subsequent userspace code has finished, inconsistent state could result. also, there seem to be kernel and/or strace bugs related to arrival of signals during fork, at least on some versions, and simply blocking signals eliminates the possibility of such bugs.