As the title suggests I cannot compile ntp. The configure script gives me "configure: error: you must have sys_param.h on your system". Is this supposed to be "sys/param.h" or is it something different? The config.log also shows another error because runetype.h is not present either. I've poked around my other builds (i686 and x86_64) and neither has either of these files.

This system is BLFS 7.9, armel. Thanks.

sys/param.h is a kernel header file - different, I expect from sys_param.h. runetype.h is one I never heard of.

What stage are we failing at? the thing to do when it fails is to hit up arrow & return, and post everything the console throws up (Including your command). Ideally it would check for the packages it requires (pkgconfig stuff) instead of weirdo headers or libs, but the bottom line is you're missing some dependency or the package is borked.

It was just checking through what usually looked like C functions and spit that out seemingly randomly. I could barely find anything for runetype.h but it looked like it is only found on BSD anyway. So I guess 'configure' wasn't convinced I was using Linux.

It took quite a lot of attempts but this package begrudgingly built but only when I moved some headers from /usr/include/sys to /usr/include AND specified --build --host and --target. Apparently this package does not like this triplet. Some packages seem not to build on arm (and the ones that do often assume you are cross-compiling) and I fear this is one of them. Debian has armv5 and armv7 packages for ntp and their patches don't show anything like this, so I guess they probably cross-compile.

In my experience, BLFS is fairly good at compiling, and lists what it needs. Is it an Arm BLFS Book?
IIRC CLFS only does LFS. YMMV from there. I would try and get compiling on the arm itself asap.