Thanks to all of you who responded to my question. As many of you
observed, the behavior I was experiencing was consistent with a
feature SUN added to Solaris in 2.6 which allows the kernel to prevent
executing instructions on the user stack. One of our junior sysadmins
decided to add extra security to a few of our machines by setting the
noexec_user_stack variable to 1 in /etc/system. This was intended to
prevent buffer-overflow attacks, but it also disabled gdb. We are
investigating workarounds to allow us to continue running gdb with
this flag set.
Thanks again for the helpful responses!
-- David Magerman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
