On Saturday 19 November 2005 05:10, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote: [...] > We could ship a fourth variant of fifth variant of glibc for i686 using > LinuxThreads. I am not particularly motivated to do this considering > how rarely anyone encounters this problem, and the corresponding cost > in archive space, build time, and maintenance.
I understand your reasoning, but unfortunately it still leaves me in the lurch. I'm the author of the application in question, and I was hoping to do a Debian package for it. The current situation is that it simply won't work on Debian systems with a 2.4 kernel. The only possible workaround is to have the package compile its own version of the library, without pthreads support, which is a maintenance nightmare. (There are lots of references to TLS in the linuxthreads code, all in files in the sysdeps/i386 directory. I assume that this is only used on i686 and above, and that i386 systems genuinely *don't* support TLS, and this isn't just an oversight?) Since this *is* a bug in linuxthreads, no matter how obscure, I'm hoping that it's less effort all around to simply fix it... but the alternatives all seem to involve keeping a shared data structure between threads containing all the necessary information. I suspect that maintaining this structure is going to be considerably more work than it first appears.
pgp57Qz1re0gk.pgp
Description: PGP signature