The sentinel attribute was originally implemented in OpenBSD's gcc and
later adopted by upstream GCC 4.0 (and clang). From the OpenBSD's
gcc-local manpage:
- gcc recognizes the extra attribute __sentinel__, which can be used to
mark varargs function that need a NULL pointer to mark argument
termination, like execl(3). This exposes latent bugs for 64-bit
architectures, where a terminating 0 will expand to a 32-bit int, and
not a full-fledged 64-bits pointer.