Comment 18 for bug 1266492

Joseph, the bootstrapping issue can presumably be fixed (and bootstrapping made easier) simply by providing a way to install headers without building glibc. This may even allow you to shave one or more steps off of the full bootstrap process.

As for the issue of new DWARF opcodes, if they prevent older unwind code from being able to interpret the unwind information at all (rather than just failing to take advantage of the new features) that seems like a fundamental design bug elsewhere that should be reported. I'm not clear whether or not that's really the case.

With that said, I find your alternate fix proposal acceptable. For the libpthread issue, I believe the DT_NEEDED could be generated at build time using a fake libgcc_s.so.1 in the glibc source tree. As for disabling backtrace by default, that's perfectly acceptable. Alternatively, glibc could always attempt to load libgcc_s.so.1 at startup and disable backtrace if it's not found.