execvpe stack-allocates a buffer used to hold the full path (combination of a PATH entry and the program name) while searching through $PATH, so at least NAME_MAX+PATH_MAX is needed. The stack size can be made conditionally smaller (the current 1024 appears appropriate) should this larger size be burdensome in those situations.
per POSIX, EINVAL is not a mandatory error, only an optional one. but reporting unsupported flags allows an application to fallback gracefully when a requested feature is not supported. this is not helpful now, but it may be in the future if additional flags are added. had this checking been present before, applications would have been able to check for the newly-added POSIX_SPAWN_SETSID feature (added in commit bb439bb17108b67f3df9c9af824d3a607b5b059d) at runtime.
this functionality has been adopted for inclusion in the next issue of POSIX as the result of Austin Group issue #1044. based on patch by Daurnimator.
nominally the low bits of the trap number on sh are the number of syscall arguments, but they have never been used by the kernel, and some code making syscalls does not even know the number of arguments and needs to pass an arbitrary high number anyway. sh3/sh4 traditionally used the trap range 16-31 for syscalls, but part of this range overlapped with hardware exceptions/interrupts on sh2 hardware, so an incompatible range 32-47 was chosen for sh2. using trap number 31 everywhere, since it's in the existing sh3/sh4 range and does not conflict with sh2 hardware, is a proposed unification of the kernel syscall convention that will allow binaries to be shared between sh2 and sh3/sh4. if this is not accepted into the kernel, we can refit the sh2 target with runtime selection mechanisms for the trap number, but doing so would be invasive and would entail non-trivial overhead.
since 1.1.0, musl has nominally required a thread pointer to be setup. most of the remaining code that was checking for its availability was doing so for the sake of being usable by the dynamic linker. as of commit 71f099cb7db821c51d8f39dfac622c61e54d794c, this is no longer necessary; the thread pointer is now valid before any libc code (outside of dynamic linker bootstrap functions) runs. this commit essentially concludes "phase 3" of the "transition path for removing lazy init of thread pointer" project that began during the 1.1.0 release cycle.
as a result of commit 12e1e324683a1d381b7f15dd36c99b37dd44d940, kernel processing of the robust list is only needed for process-shared mutexes. previously the first attempt to lock any owner-tracked mutex resulted in robust list initialization and a set_robust_list syscall. this is no longer necessary, and since the kernel's record of the robust list must now be cleared at thread exit time for detached threads, optimizing it out is more worthwhile than before too.
the specification for execvp itself is unclear as to whether encountering a file that cannot be executed due to EACCES during the PATH search is a mandatory error condition; however, XBD 8.3's specification of the PATH environment variable clarifies that the search continues until a file with "appropriate execution permissions" is found. since it seems undesirable/erroneous to report ENOENT rather than EACCES when an early path element has a non-executable file and all later path elements lack any file by the requested name, the new code stores a flag indicating that EACCES was seen and sets errno back to EACCES in this case.
the write function is a cancellation point and accesses thread-local state belonging to the calling thread in the parent process. since cancellation is blocked for the duration of posix_spawn, this is probably safe, but it's fragile and unnecessary. making the syscall directly is just as easy and clearly safe.