Since I can't reproduce the original crash, I am trying other means of gathering evidence. A SIGTERM could be handled at any time right? Including as in this artificial reproduction. > But the Lisp backtrace doesn't tell which function of the > kill-emacs-hook was running, Yes it does. The hook is ede-save-cache. It is one of the two hooks my configuration sets up, as I indicated earlier. > and GC didn't really start doing its job, so it's not exactly the > same crash. It is after gc_in_progress = 1. Are you trying to argue Emacs cannot possibly enter the SIGTERM handler between that and when GC "really starts doing its job" (whenever that is)? > And look at the variable 'args', which should be a list. Since this > session crashed in GC, it is not safe to print Lisp objects with > "pp" and its likes. Instead, you will have to walk the list using > "xcar" and "xcdr", display the type of each object in the list using > "xtype", and then display the object itself with the appropriate x* > command, normally "xsymbol", since the list is constructed from > function symbols. Can this be done for core dump files?