My use-case is somewhat unusual, so I thought I'd report these since they
may not get tripped under "normal" use. This is against 2.0.0rc1.
Setup is a shared root on GlusterFS/AFR with only one node (2nd node not yet
built).
Something weird seems to happen with some uses of ncurses libraries and
headers. If I try to compile the kernel using "make menuconfig" while the
root FS (including ncurses libraries and headers) is on GlusterFS, it fails
complaining that it couldn't find the headers. The exact same system image
(same tar ball) expanded onto an ext3 file system doesn't exhibit this
problem. In both cases /usr/src/linux is on an NFS file system, so since
that is the same in both test cases, the problem seems to be connected to
the root FS. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to get the logs out of the root FS
mount since they are initially created on the initrd which gets deallocated
after booting. :(
A similar, but wider-ranging problem happens when installing nVidia drivers
from the nVidia supplied shell archives. It, too, fails to find curses and
falls back to text mode. But it also then fails to install properly. It
first complains about being unable to back up the files it is replacing,
then it complains that it couldn't install some of the files. The files it
places on the FS end up being badly corrupted and are not even identified as
elf libraries (including the kernel module it builds). This works fine on
the ext3 FS, and putting the said files into the tar ball and extracting
them onto the Gluster root that way, creates the files correctly.