The SIGABRT comes from glibc detecting malloc() free list corruption and abort()ing.
(gdb) bt #0 0xffffe410 in __kernel_vsyscall () #1 0xb7e266d1 in raise () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 #2 0xb7e27f9b in abort () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 #3 0xb7e63d35 in free () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 #4 0xb7e63b75 in free () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 #5 0x08149b1b in SrvXkbResizeKeyType (xkb=0x8294ce8, type_ndx=10, map_count=13, want_preserve=0, new_num_lvls=8) at XKBMAlloc.c:520 #6 0x08126b0a in ProcXkbSetMap (client=0x84cf0d0) at xkb.c:1937 #7 0x080c9a7e in Dispatch () at dispatch.c:459 #8 0x080d6785 in main (argc=11, argv=0xbfaa9b94, envp=0x0) at main.c:484 I have a 3.3Mb bzip2ed core file of /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6 as well if anybody is interested. Should I attach it here? Also, since this seems to have broken X for a lot of people running Testing, should this have its severity upgraded? Regards //Johan (now happily downgraded after a couple of hours of debugging)