> If somebody would provide a patch that adds prctl to the posix module,
> that would be fine with me - we have a long tradition of exposing all
> available system calls if somebody wants them.

Just for the record, I was about to try to do this, when I realized that exposing prctl requires expecting a variable number of arguments with variable types.
It turns out providing a Python wrapper for such a kind of C API is just a pain.
There's an implementation though, handling 2 args only (instead of 5):
https://github.com/seveas/python-prctl/blob/master/_prctlmodule.c#L9
Considering that this also Linux-only, I don't think it really worths the effort.