thread-local storage problem with 2.4.21

[bakreule]

Hello peoples, hopefully someone is having the same problem and has resolved it because I'm out of ideas and google has nothing. First the *ware:

RH 9.0
kernel 2.4.21
KDE 3.1-10 Red Hat
AGP Diamond Viper 770
NVidia 4363

I've been compiling kernels and the nvidia modules for them since 2.4.18 without trouble. I compiled and installed 2.4.21 without troubles, but whenever I run the newly compiled NVidia module I get the following error:

Cannot setup thread-local storage: Kernel too old for thread-local storage support

Note that X seems to start just fine, I get this message when KDE starts up. I get a small little window saying couldn't start KDE. I click OK, it drops back into the console with the above message appearing three times.

Note that I did a make oldconfig when I compiled my new kernel, so I don't think I missed anything in the config

Anyone have any ideas? Am I missing something obvious? Thanks!

[bwkaz]

Since you use RedHat 9, your C library is configured to support thread-local storage. The default RH9 kernel does support it, too (they did a backport from kernel 2.5 to get it in there).

However, none of the kernel.org 2.4 kernels at all will support TLS. This, I think, is the problem -- your dynamic linker is trying to link in the TLS version of the various libraries for some reason, but since the kernel doesn't support TLS, it fails.

Maybe a reinstall of the nVidia driver, when booted to 2.4.21, might help?

What happens when you pass --extract-only to the installer, then cd into the new directory and run ./usr/bin/tls_test ; echo $? -- does it print 0, or 1?

[bakreule]

Wow, thanks.. I had no idea about the backport that Red Hat did... (is Thread Local Storage really that good that RH would take code from a beta kernel and put it into a production environment???)

It actually had nothing to do with the nvidia.o or nvidia_drv.o files themselves, as you said, it had to do with the libGLcore.so files located in usr/lib of the NVidia drivers dir. (I'm really glad I didn't delete the NVidia source dir). I noticed for the first time that there is a "tls" directory in usr/lib. I did a search for those .so files and found that the ones which were installed came from the tls directory. I copied the "normal" ones, and started X with no problems.

Woohoo! I can finally change my inittab runlevel back to 5......

Thank you very much for your help.....

[matthew]

Originally posted by bakreule
Wow, thanks.. I had no idea about the backport that Red Hat did... (is Thread Local Storage really that good that RH would take code from a beta kernel and put it into a production environment???)

RedHat have a 'long and distinguished history' of taking 'beta' code and putting it in a production system..
GCC springs to mind, but there are others..