As noted in JDK-8213718 the except002 and except003 stress tests sometimes show that they encounter a NullPointerException at places where NPE is not semantically possible eg:

log[messages++] = "error message";

This suggest that in fact we are getting a SEGV, likely triggered by the out-of-memory conditions that these tests generate. Due to the code location the SEGV is interpreted as a NullPointerException.