It seems a bit extreme to add a syscall for this. As you said, they have to bite the bullet and fix the suid programs. And why not just fix the exec call in us

It seems a bit extreme to add a syscall for this. As you said, they have to bite the bullet and fix the suid programs. And why not just fix the exec call in userland? I'm not sure who supplies it - the C standard library or the kernel headers. You would fix all the cases of accidentally calling something with argc==0 and it would not run afoul of the kernel breaking userspace.