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Porting NPTL to GNU/kFreeBSD?


Some Debian developers and users are creating a new (but as of yet unincluded 
in unstable) Debian port that uses the FreeBSD kernel as well as the GNU 
userland (glibc, coreutils, etc.).  We call this port GNU/kFreeBSD, and so 
far, it runs on i386-style machines only (i486-i686 inclusive).  In order to 
do this, we have ported glibc 2.3 to the FreeBSD kernel, based mostly off the 
work of Bruno Haible.  We have a (mostly) working threads implementation with 
LinuxThreads (e.g. KDE works).  However, I have seen in the CVS repository 
that glibc 2.4 will not support LinuxThreads any longer [0].  As a 
consequence, I feel it is essential to port NPTL to the FreeBSD kernel for 
the port's continued health.  

We are currently using FreeBSD 5.4 as the basis; when we figure out why the 
FreeBSD 6.0 kernel/glibc combination doesn't like sshd anymore and fix it, we 
will likely move to that.

I am not asking for people to do this task; I will do it, but I have some 
questions:

Are there any portability traps of which I need to be aware (other than the 
obvious)?
FreeBSD's libpthread/libkse is M:N, while libthr is 1:1.  I am unsure whether 
libthr's kernel support works on i386, so I'd like to get NPTL to 
conditionally support M:N if possible.  Is this a silly idea?
Is there anything else important that I need to know?

I am subscribed; no need to Cc: me.

[0] 
http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/NEWS?rev=1.156&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=glibc

-- 
Brian M. Carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx>
Running on GNU/kFreeBSD.
Support alternative kernels in Debian!


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