Played till 0115 EST and everything seemed good. There were comments about defbot behaviour but I didn't see for myself.

Default Gentoo setup is to -not- use NPTL , nor apply the patches for it. NPTL is only activated on the following two conditions:

+nptl in USE flags ;; (not default)
2.6 kernel system ;; (not headers necessarily)


Death in mutex_wait sounds sorta bad though.. actually sounds worse than "sorta"

Headers are (ebuild)required for glibc nptl. You can use the headers from the 2.6 kernel package, but since you change kernels more often than headers it's not the best idea. I do reccommend nptl, though. It's very nice, and no stability problems here.

[OT] Gentoo and nptl

well, the 2.6 kernel has had their headers frozen for the relevant part so there shouldn't be any changes as to what is exposed to user-space.

Also, using a system with 2.6-headers in /usr/include can give other headaches. (not everything is compatible with it yet.)

2.6 kernel source in /usr/src/linux (symlink) + USE="nptl" + emerge glibc is enough to get a glibc with nptl.

However, this is quite diverged from the thread.