I would like to see a libunwind based gdb in some future release of RHEL / ia64. That would enable us (BEA) to get stack traces through signal handler boundaries, as well as getting stack traces through dynamically generated code. I know you have been looking into this a bit, I'm filing this bugzilla for tracking progress.
This will be included in RHEL3-U1. gdb-6.0post-0.20031117.6 is the version. You will need the libunwind rpm as well.