Thanks. There's still something fishy going on, since the truss output is acting like we are never calling openat.
Can you please send a copy of your config.h? I want to verify that HAVE_OPENAT and related macros are set. Also, can you please verify that gnu/openat.c is being compiled and the result is being linked into 'tar'? Can you send the assembly-language output for openat.c? Typically this can be done by compiling with -S rather than with -c (all other options being the same).
