Eclipse Crashing on documentation popups appearing

calendar Feb 26, 2011  · android eclipse Gentoo

After performing a large number of package upgrades on my Gentoo machine, I discovered that Eclipse would crash when showing documentation, or otherwise embedded browser-base content ( including the web browser preferences) .

The error logged in my home directory looked something like this:

#  
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:  
#  
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007f30bd433caa, pid=8454, tid=139847862494992  
#  
# JRE version: 6.0_24-b07  
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (19.1-b02 mixed mode linux-amd64 compressed oops)  
# Problematic frame:  
# C  [libmozjs.so+0xbdcaa]  
#  
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:  
#   http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp  
# The crash happened outside the Java Virtual Machine in native code.  
# See problematic frame for where to report the bug.  
#

Googling the error messages didn’t seem to help much ( looked to point to xulrunner, but upgrading or downgrading the package had no effect ), so I slowly rolled back packages that had been upgraded.

Eventually I discovered the fix was to re-emerge dev-java/swt without the xulrunner use flag – it seems this library seems to have issues with the latest version of xulrunner.