it's UB to fetch variadic args when none are passed, and this caused
real crashes on ppc due to its calling convention, which defines that
for variadic functions aggregate types be passed as pointers.
the assignment caused that pointer to get dereferenced, resulting in
a crash.
per POSIX, the variadic argument has type union semun, which may
contain a pointer or int; the type read depends on the command being
issued. this allows the userspace part of the implementation to be
type-correct without requiring special-casing for different commands.
the kernel always expects to receive the argument interpreted as
unsigned long (or equivalently, a pointer), and does its own handling
of extracting the int portion from the representation, as needed.
this change fixes two possible issues: most immediately, reading the
argument as a (signed) long and passing it to the syscall would
perform incorrect sign-extension of pointers on the upcoming x32
target. the other possible issue is that some archs may use different
(user-space) argument-passing convention for unions, preventing va_arg
from correctly obtaining the argument when the type long (or even
unsigned long or void *) is passed to it.
some of these definitions were just plain wrong, others based on
outdated ancient "non-64" versions of the kernel interface.
as much as possible has now been moved out of bits/*
these changes break abi (the old abi for these functions was wrong),
but since they were not working anyway it can hardly matter.
