A while ago I posted a question about a segmentation fault error I was getting with
Tomcat. The machine is SuSE Linux 7.1 and the application was fine with J2SDK 1.3 but
when I switched to J2SDK 1.3.1 it aborted with a segmentation fault. It turns out
that it was aborting in the call to new DOMParser() in Xerces so it's not a Tomcat
problem per se, but I still think it's worth mentioning what I found.
I have discovered that this is a documented problem (Sun Java bug database ID
4466587). The problem appears when an exception is thrown inside a deeply recursive
call and seems to be related to glibc-2.2-x. I gather that glibc-2.1-x enforced a 2M
stack size limit but glibc-2.2-x does not, but it can only handle larger stacks if
it's compiled with --enable-kernel=2.4.0 . The workaround is to set 'ulimit -s 2048'
in your bash shell or 'limit stacksize 2048' in tcsh before starting the VM. I have
not tried recompiling glibc.
