Re: [patches] [RFC] RISC-V: Don't set CLONE_BACKWARDS

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Tue Jan 09 2018 - 03:11:51 EST


On Mon, Jan 08, 2018 at 05:27:56PM -0800, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
> During the glibc upstreaming it was suggested that CLONE_BACKWARDS was a
> deprecated ABI decision. I think we just copied it from ARM, but I
> don't see any reason to favor one over the other.
>
> While we haven't released yet so I think it's still legal to change our
> ABI, I'd actually kind of prefer to avoid changing our ABI this late in
> the game. I guess this is more of an RFC than a patch: is there a
> reason to avoid CLONE_BACKWARDS?
>
> Note that I haven't tried any of this -- I'll give it some thourough
> testing and submit an actual patch if this is the way we want to go.

I see absolutely no reason to change this. Linux currently has 30
architecture port, out of which 10 (including riscv, i386, arm and arm64)
set CLONE_BACKWARDS.

There are no performance benefits of doing it one way or another, and
changing it now will break all the riscv enablement that's been going
on.