Description of Problem: Every invocation of rpm from rpm-4.0-4.3 is causing this: rpm(720): unaligned trap at 000000012012a7e8: 000002000000c02e 28 2 Older version of rpm were not doing that. Moreover with a database left in an inconsistent state by an installer the only response from rpm is "Segmentation violation (core dumped)". A core file is not very illuminating as this is stripped, statically linked, binary and the only things gdb is able to extract from that is: Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault. #0 0x12003eb40 in ?? () and no backtrace is available.
Probably, but the problems are with gcc and glibc, not rpm. Try rpm-4.0.2-7x from ftp.rpm.org or Red Hat updates, please reopen this bug if problem persists there.
Replacing rpm with a version 4.0.2-7x, and doing 'rpm --rebuilddb' afterwards, indeed helped to clear the problem. I was able to fix a mess left by a failing installer. "Unaligned traps" seem to be dependent on glibc. Things are ok if I am using 'rpm -r /mnt/other ....' from 7.0 installation with glibc-2.2-12 but if I will do 'chroot /mnt/other' then the same version of rpm, but glibc-2.2.3-5, comes immediately with: rpm(1264): unaligned trap at ..... (like in the original report although an instruction address is different).