seg fault on startup

[Ben Tatham <bentatham at nanometrics dot ca>]

I am building an application for Linux 2.4 with GCJ 4.1.2 for libc 2.3.3 for powerpc-860. 
Unfortunately, the application crashes on startup everytime.  I have gone back to trying to build a 
simple Hello World app, and the only version I can get to run is on that is stripped and statically 
linked.  If I don't strip it or if I try and use the shared libgcj, it seg faults.  Even if the 
libgcj is also stripped.

Otherwise, no matter what I seem to do to either my Foo app or my real application, I always get a 
Segmentation Fault.

The backtrace as seen from the core dump is:
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0f44019c in java::lang::NullPointerException::NullPointerException() ()
   from /usr/lib/libgcj.so.7
#1  0x0f1e6874 in catch_segv(int, sigcontext*) () from /usr/lib/libgcj.so.7
#2  0x7fc00748 in ?? ()
(gdb)

If I run the app from within gdb, I can the following backtrace:

#0  0x0f43f5e4 in java::lang::VMThrowable::__U3c_clinit__U3e_() ()
   from /usr/lib/libgcj.so.7
#1  0x0f21db88 in java::lang::Class::initializeClass() ()
   from /usr/lib/libgcj.so.7
#2  0x0f1e783c in _Jv_CreateJavaVM(_Jv_VMInitArgs*) ()
   from /usr/lib/libgcj.so.7
#3  0x0f1e7c68 in _Jv_RunMain(_Jv_VMInitArgs*, java::lang::Class*, char const*, int, char const**, 
bool) () from /usr/lib/libgcj.so.7
#4  0x0f1e7dbc in _Jv_RunMain(java::lang::Class*, char const*, int, char const**, bool) () from 
/usr/lib/libgcj.so.7
#5  0x0f1e7dec in JvRunMain () from /usr/lib/libgcj.so.7


We are upgrading from 4.0.1, and we had upgraded GCJ many times before, with problems always being 
on the compile side of things and were always resolved.  This time, its the runtime side...what the 
difference this time, I have no idea.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?  Any help is appreciated...

-Ben