Inefficient ia64 system call implementation in glibc

["H. J. Lu" <hjl@lucon.org>]

The inline ia64 system call assumes all values passed to kernel are
signed 64bit. It does sign extension if the incoming arg is not signed
64bit. In case of fxstat.c:

int
__fxstat (int vers, int fd, struct stat *buf)
{
  return INLINE_SYSCALL (fstat, 2, fd, CHECK_1 (buf));
}
 
it leads to

0000000000000000 <__fxstat>:
   0:   00 20 39 0c 80 05       [MII]       alloc r36=ar.pfs,14,6,0
   6:   f0 e0 01 12 48 a0                   mov r15\x1212
   c:   04 08 00 84                         mov r37=r1
  10:   01 38 01 44 00 21       [MII]       mov r39=r34
  16:   60 02 84 2c 00 60                   sxt4 r38=r33
					    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  1c:   04 00 c4 00                         mov r35°;;
  20:   0a 00 00 00 00 02       [MMI]       break.m 0x100000;;
  26:   10 02 20 00 42 e0                   mov r33=r8

"sxt4 r38=r33" is not necessary at all since kernel will never use
the uppper 4 bytes with

asmlinkage long sys_newfstat(unsigned int fd, struct stat * statbuf)

The basically problem is glibc doesn't store information about what
the kernel interface is so that it can't efficiently set up parameters
for system calls. Is there a way to improve the situation?


H.J.