conftest dies with signal 12

[Chuck Swiger]

Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote:
> I have seen messages like this on every FreeBSD machine that I have ever 
> built.  Can anybody indicate to me what this means?
> 
> pid 60038 (conftest), uid 0: exited on signal 12 (core dumped)

While building software which uses GNU autoconf, ./configure tries to build 
and run a bunch of tiny test programs to see whether various system calls are 
available and how they work, figure out sizes of variable types, look for 
compilers for languages not being used by your software, and so forth.

SIG 12 means:

      No    Name         Default action       Description
[ ... ]
      12    SIGSYS       create core image    non-existent system call invoked

-- 
-Chuck