Per ARC TLS ABI, r25 is designated TP (thread pointer register).
However so far kernel didn't do any special treatment, like setting up
usermode r25, even for CLONE_SETTLS. We instead relied on libc runtime
to do this, in say clone libc wrapper [1]. This was deliberate to keep
kernel ABI agnostic (userspace could potentially change TP, specially
for different ARC ISA say ARCompact vs. ARCv2 with different spare
registers etc)
However userspace setting up r25, after clone syscall opens a race, if
child is not scheduled and gets a signal instead. It starts off in
userspace not in clone but in a signal handler and anything TP sepcific
there such as pthread_self() fails which showed up with uClibc
testsuite nptl/tst-kill6 [2]
Fix this by having kernel populate r25 to TP value. So this locks in
ABI, but it was not going to change anyways, and fwiw is same for both
ARCompact (arc700 core) and ARCvs (HS3x cores)