Currently a backtrace will just print this for a signal delivery: #3 <signal handler called> gdb often knows the signal here, so it should display it. If you look at the backtrace here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=849588 Direct link: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=605630 ... you can see a case where the signal is not evident in the bt. The bt output makes it look like the signal calls quit_force directly.