I just upgraded to the most recent 2.4.29-pre1 sources from the CVS archive
 with the intent of being able to compile with gcc-3.4.3.

It turns out that the compiler is splitting:

 save_static_function(sys_fork);
 static_unused int _sys_fork(struct pt_regs regs)

The result being an unusable kernel.

I think that this issue has been discussed before, but I couldn't find the
solution in the mail group.  So I applied this small hack.  The
modifications to syscall.c and signal.c may not be necessary, but I
borrowed them from the 2.6 tree in hopes of fixing the problem and then
moved to the Makefile change.

It may be that only the Makefile change is necessary (I suspect so), but I
have not tried it alone.

The CVS versions in the diff are from my local cvs and do not correspond to
the linux-mips.org CVS.

David Daney.