a request for this behavior has been open for a long time. the motivation is that application code, particularly under some language runtimes designed around very-low-footprint coroutine type constructs, may be operating with extremely small stack sizes unsuitable for receiving signals, using a separate signal stack for any signals it might handle. progress on this was blocked at one point trying to determine whether the implementation is actually entitled to clobber the alt stack, but the phrasing "available to the implementation" in the POSIX spec for sigaltstack seems to make it clear that the application cannot rely on the contents of this memory to be preserved in the absence of signal delivery (on the abstract machine, excluding implementation-internal signals) and that we can therefore use it for delivery of signals that "don't exist" on the abstract machine. no change is made for SIGTIMER since it is always blocked when used, and accepted via sigwaitinfo rather than execution of the signal handler.
this is a workaround to avoid a crashing regression on qemu-user when dynamic TLS is installed at dlopen time. the sigaction syscall should not be able to fail, but it does fail for implementation-internal signals under qemu user-level emulation if the host libc qemu is running under reserves the same signals for implementation-internal use, since qemu makes no provision to redirect/emulate them. after sigaction fails, the subsequent tkill would terminate the process abnormally as the default action. no provision to account for membarrier failing is made in the dynamic linker code that installs new TLS. at the formal level, the missing barrier in this case is incorrect, and perhaps we should fail the dlopen operation, but in practice all the archs we support (and probably all real-world archs except alpha, which isn't yet supported) should give the right behavior with no barrier at all as a consequence of consume-order properties. in the long term, this workaround should be supplemented or replaced by something better -- a different fallback approach to ensuring memory consistency, or dynamic allocation of implementation-internal signals. the latter is appealing in that it would allow cancellation to work under qemu-user too, and would even allow many levels of nested emulation.
the motivation for this change is twofold. first, it gets the fallback logic out of the dynamic linker, improving code readability and organization. second, it provides application code that wants to use the membarrier syscall, which depends on preregistration of intent before the process becomes multithreaded unless unbounded latency is acceptable, with a symbol that, when linked, ensures that this registration happens.