such archs are expected to omit definitions of the SYS_* macros for
syscalls their kernels lack from arch/$ARCH/bits/syscall.h. the
preprocessor is then able to select the an appropriate implementation
for affected functions. two basic strategies are used on a
case-by-case basis:

where the old syscalls correspond to deprecated library-level
functions, the deprecated functions have been converted to wrappers
for the modern function, and the modern function has fallback code
(omitted at the preprocessor level on new archs) to make use of the
old syscalls if the new syscall fails with ENOSYS. this also improves
functionality on older kernels and eliminates the incentive to program
with deprecated library-level functions for the sake of compatibility
with older kernels.

in other situations where the old syscalls correspond to library-level
functions which are not deprecated but merely lack some new features,
such as the *at functions, the old syscalls are still used on archs
which support them. this may change at some point in the future if or
when fallback code is added to the new functions to make them usable
(possibly with reduced functionality) on old kernels.

this was originally written for an early draft of the library where
non-standard functions would reside in a static library separate from
the shared libc.so, which would implement a pure standard. the idea
was not to depend on an implementation-dependent __syscall_ret
function in the main libc. but it turned out to be better to put
everything in a single library for both static and dynamic linking
uses, and thus the (incomplete) remnants of this feature were just
enlarging the source and binary.