Just uploaded my Debian Jikes RVM package to my personal FTP site for my Debian Mentor (Greg Prokopski, a.k.a. gadek) to look at.
I was disappointed to see that Debian's glibc apparently does not use the GS register to store per-thread data. This means that I had to compile a version of Jikes RVM that won't be capable of exploiting SMP processors. The correct fix to the problem would be to get rid of Jikes RVM's m:n threading. I wonder how much work that would be. It would solve other problems as well, since otherwise any JNI calls we do on such a platform may hang. However, a much better bet would be to finish the self-bootstrapping work that I paused in order to build the Debian packages before Sarge gets frozen.