It seems that between 2.6.18-rc5-git2 and -git3 some of our test systems
stopped compiling the kernel; the two I have investigated appear to be
Numa-Q systems, x86 smp.  They are failing as below:

  CC      arch/i386/kernel/asm-offsets.s
In file included from include/linux/spinlock.h:86,
                 from include/linux/capability.h:45,
                 from include/linux/sched.h:44,
                 from include/linux/module.h:9,
                 from include/linux/crypto.h:20,
                 from arch/i386/kernel/asm-offsets.c:7:
include/asm/spinlock.h: In function `__raw_read_lock':
include/asm/spinlock.h:164: error: parse error before ')' token
make[1]: *** [arch/i386/kernel/asm-offsets.s] Error 1
make: *** [prepare0] Error 2

The only change relating to this file appears to be this one:

commit 8c74932779fc6f61b4c30145863a17125c1a296c
Author: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
Date:   Wed Aug 30 19:37:14 2006 +0200

    [PATCH] i386: Remove alternative_smp

    The .fill causes miscompilations with some binutils version.

    Instead just patch the lock prefix in the lock constructs. That is the
    majority of the cost and should be good enough.

    Cc: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@suse.de>
    Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Tried backing this out and the compile failure seems to go away.

Ok, having stared at it for a bit it seems the attached patch fixes it
up.  But as its asm could someone cast an eye over it.

-apw