Thanks, I've also (yesterday) heard the same about NPTL from the qemu developers list. Simply my use of particular userland libs could be causing me the issues. I might try and find quite old dists to compile against or just nick binaries from.

As for mixing stuff, well I was segregating with ./ld-linux.so.3 --library-path ... ./binary which is not quite chrooted but as separate as safe. But mixing was cool and I know the dangers I've also been unable to get chroot (busybox) to work as I expected it, I get /bin/sh no such file or directory despite there being a bin/sh in the /place/ I'm chrooting to.

Sadly I'm away for 3 weeks now with probably limited connectivity. I encourage others to try what I've checked out. Qemu peeps say my override of __clear_cache() was okay, so the qemu-i386 binary is safe to use, if somebody wants a copy it's wgetable from this url: http://a.trap.me.uk/qemu-i386 - they also agree a p90 was reasonable speed to expect (excluding any floating point). My experience with xeyes and topper show that graphically it's nifty and well worth investigating.

The rest of this thread should help the rest of the set up, most people will have the right libs and files lying around.