Need Help building glibc with NPTL support for ARM Linux 2.4.20

[Andrew Chalmers]

I'm looking for some help getting NPTL working for an ARM linux target. The 
target kernel is a 2.4.20 (Montavista mvl3 based) running an OMAP5912.
So far I have been using a tool chain built manually from source, with some help 
from Dan Kegel's crosstool. I'm currently using binutils-2.14, gcc-3.3.6 and 
glibc-2.3.2 (with linuxthreads-2.3.2).

For the past 2 years this has work well.

Recently however I have run into difficulties with the combination of timers, 
signals, and threads. I want to have a posix timer signal a specific posix 
thread. But it seems the linuxthreads idea of threads doesn't match with the 
posix timers support in the kernel (the libposix-timer support comes from 
hrtimers-support-3.1.1). The answer appears to be to use the NPTL support.

The problem is I can't build a working arm cross tool chain with NPTL support.
I tried various versions of binutils,  gcc and glibc. I've found out about 
glibc-ports. Along the way I've tripped over various issues including
__thread support required
force-unwind support required
cannot find pthread.h
and a few other compile related error. that I cannot remember.

But I have been unsuccessful. I'm at a loss to understand why this is so difficult.

Can some one please help me with which versions of the tools chain and patches I 
need and some instructions on what tricks I need to get it all working.


Cheers,

-- 
Andrew Chalmers

Software Design Engineer
Ellex Medical
82 Gilbert St, Adelaide SA, 5000 Australia
Tel +61-8-8104 5246 | Fax +61-8-8221 5651
www.ellex.com