Re: [9fans] plan9port update

[Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com>]

> I compile it under Linux 2.6.8. It works but I can't use rio anymore
> because I can't create new "windows". I can select "New" from the menu
> but don't get the "cross". An older version of plan9ports, I think it
> is from july 2004, works.

Gentoo uses 2.6.8 kernels but without NPTL (Linux's new posix
threading library) turned on by default.  Plan9port was assuming
that the kernel version alone was enough to tell whether NPTL
was in use, but it's not.  

The latest version detects NPTL during the build and behaves
accordingly.  (If you do want NPTL on your Gentoo system, you
can list it in your USE line in /etc/make.conf and then rebuild
glibc.  See the Gentoo documentation for more.)

The NPTL (aka TLS, since along with NPTL comes better support for
thread-local storage) issue is certainly what's causing Opera to
get tripped up too. 

Libthread also tries to do better than seg fault in the case
where you're running binaries for NPTL on non-NPTL systems:

tux=; ./o.tprimes
./o.tprimes: cannot use LinuxThreads as pthread library; see
/usr/local/plan9/src/libthread/README.Linux
tux=; 

Russ