This isn't particularly deep, but I was playing with _start and totally static ELF exes yesterday, and I had this minor realization about the environment. It lives completely in userspace, and it's basically just a command line with a standard format.
People have varying opinions about environment variables. Because of the way your shell handles them, they're usually implicit and easily forgotten. People rarely specify them manually, and when they have to, they grumble. But, as far as the kernel is concerned, they're just another null-terminated array of strings to pass to userspace when you exec a new process. Truly, the execve prototype is:
int execve(const char *fname, char **argv, char **envp);
There's really nothing special about envp. You can pass argv there if you like, but if you exec a regular exe that uses glibc, it probably won't understand you.
The environment has a standard, agreed-upon format, which is not true for argv. Imagine if we used environment variables for most arguments. You'd never have to write another flag parser again. Different, unrelated components of your program can all read from it without conflicting with each other.
On the other hand, it's a totally global and flat namespace, kind of like DOM ids and CSS class names. Everyone's nervous that they're going to trip over each other. So, people tend to shy away from using it, and every exe has a slightly different flags format.
