A recently introduced security feature (exec-shield) may cause JVM to throw
StackOverflowException or even die on a crash. The problem is that the
exec-shield patch randomizes the starting stack pointer so much that the
main thread is started below (or near) its stack limit.

Please see Redhat bugzilla:
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=126297

This should not affect pure Java application, as the default Java launcher
does not have PT_GNU_STACK, so exec-shield should be disabled by default.
However, native application using JNI_CreateJavaVM to invoke JVM might
run into troubles on RHEL 3 or Fedora Core 2.

Anyway, if you are seeing this problem, you could get around the issue
by disabling exec-shield-randomize, e.g. (run as root):
  sysctl -w kernel.exec-shield-randomize=0
or,
  echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield-randomize