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.
the resolution of austin group issue #370 removes the requirement that posix_spawn fail when the close file action is performed on an already-closed fd. since there are no other meaningful errors for close, just ignoring the return value completely is the simplest fix.
the main motivation for this change is to remove the assumption that the tid of the main thread is also the pid of the process. (the value returned by the set_tid_address syscall was used to fill both fields despite it semantically being the tid.) this is historically and presently true on linux and unlikely to change, but it conceivably could be false on other systems that otherwise reproduce the linux syscall api/abi. only a few parts of the code were actually still using the cached pid. in a couple places (aio and synccall) it was a minor optimization to avoid a syscall. caching could be reintroduced, but lazily as part of the public getpid function rather than at program startup, if it's deemed important for performance later. in other places (cancellation and pthread_kill) the pid was completely unnecessary; the tkill syscall can be used instead of tgkill. this is actually a rather subtle issue, since tgkill is supposedly a solution to race conditions that can affect use of tkill. however, as documented in the commit message for commit 7779dbd2663269b465951189b4f43e70839bc073, tgkill does not actually solve this race; it just limits it to happening within one process rather than between processes. we use a lock that avoids the race in pthread_kill, and the use in the cancellation signal handler is self-targeted and thus not subject to tid reuse races, so both are safe regardless of which syscall (tgkill or tkill) is used.
such archs are expected to omit definitions of the SYS_* macros for syscalls their kernels lack from arch/$ARCH/bits/syscall.h. the preprocessor is then able to select the an appropriate implementation for affected functions. two basic strategies are used on a case-by-case basis: where the old syscalls correspond to deprecated library-level functions, the deprecated functions have been converted to wrappers for the modern function, and the modern function has fallback code (omitted at the preprocessor level on new archs) to make use of the old syscalls if the new syscall fails with ENOSYS. this also improves functionality on older kernels and eliminates the incentive to program with deprecated library-level functions for the sake of compatibility with older kernels. in other situations where the old syscalls correspond to library-level functions which are not deprecated but merely lack some new features, such as the *at functions, the old syscalls are still used on archs which support them. this may change at some point in the future if or when fallback code is added to the new functions to make them usable (possibly with reduced functionality) on old kernels.
open is handled specially because it is used from so many places, in so many variants (2 or 3 arguments, setting errno or not, and cancellable or not). trying to do it as a function would not only increase bloat, but would also risk subtle breakage. this is the first step towards supporting "new" archs where linux lacks "old" syscalls.