I've looked again at it and it is actually less problematic that I first thought but I still see the following two cases: 1. vfork seems to not set any TIF_ flags so a ptracer setting regs while a vforking task is stopped in ptrace_notify called from vfork would result in clobbered %ecx and %edx. 2. A ptracer could use %ecx or %edx to pass information to signal handlers and this would not work with the current [rt_]sigsuspend. These only need setting TIF_IRET on ptrace setregs though. There is also the very small advantage of being able to hardcode SYSENTER_RETURN as the return eip for sysexit if TIF_IRET is set in all the 3 places.