I wasted the better half of the day trying to get glibc to compile. It just wouldn't work for me. Nobody else appears to have problems with this.

The problem was that glibc's new ld.so checks whether the ELF run path is set. This is done for shared libraries using -Wl,-rpath, which you might have seen somewhere already. Or you can override it at run time with $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Or you can specify a default at link time with $LD_RUN_PATH.

This I happen to do to make all those stupid GNOME applications find their libraries on my system, which I do not want clobbering my /usr/local/lib, so I put them somewhere under /opt.

How does ld.so check? With assert(). Apparently nobody ever tested this code, because assert calls __assert_fail, which calls some internal printf clone, which calls some conversion routine for numbers, and that one segfaults before anything is actually printed.

So ld.so segfaults before calling any syscall that could be observed with strace. D'oh!