stupid crappy java
I've spent the past three days fighting with the new servers we got at work, and then yesterday that was compounded when i had to start fighting with java on them. Linux just doesn't appear to get along very well with the hardware (I suspect its the Adaptec SCSI RAID controller). I seem to be able to only get a successful RHES-3.0 installation when the cover is off the server. I still haven't figured out the magic sequence of events that will let me consistantly convert the filesystem to XFS though. My new plan for this, since i've now hosed two installs when trying to use convertfs, is to boot off of KNOPPIX, mkfs.xfs the filesystem on disk, and then scp everything from a box where RHES-3.0 is already installed to the box where i just formatted everything XFS. Run /sbin/lilo and hopefully I'll be good to go.
As for the java mess, NPTL (Native Posix Threading Library) is at fault. Java runs absolutely horribly if there isn't NPTL support in both glibc & the kernel on the box. Well, unfortunately, 2.4.x kernels do not have NPTL support, except those that Redhat provides. So when I upgraded to 2.4.26 in order to get XFS support, i lost NPTL. This wasn't immediately obvious, so all I was seeing was java seg faulting. I then had the brainstorm that maybe NPTL was at fault, and exported LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 (which disables NPTL) and then java ran. The new problem is that it runs poorly. Very poorly. At first I thought that I'd have to use someone else's kernel RPM that had both XFS and NPTL support for 2.4.x.
Then someone pointed out that 2.6.x kernels have NPTL support natively, and they already have XFS support. So i'm going to give that a try.