Currently we know that the BDB storage engine works with the following operating systems:
Linux 2.x Intel
Sun Solaris (SPARC and x86)
FreeBSD 4.x/5.x (x86, sparc64)
IBM AIX 4.3.x
SCO OpenServer
SCO UnixWare 7.1.x
It doesn't work with the following operating systems:
Linux 2.x Alpha
Linux 2.x AMD64
Linux 2.x IA64
Linux 2.x s390
Max OS X
Note: The above list is not complete; we will update it as we receive more information.
If you build MySQL with support for BDB tables and get the following error in the log file when you start mysqld:
bdb: architecture lacks fast mutexes: applications cannot be threaded Can't init databases
This means that BDB tables are not supported for your architecture. In this case you must rebuild MySQL without BDB table support.