Comment 2 for bug 633668

This isn't rpmdb corruption, it's just BDB saying the previous access died in an uncontrolled manner while inside BDB code, which is a condition that isn't automatically cleared (whereas dying in application code while holding a read-only lock is automatically handled these days).

Rpm is blocking the signals for a reason here: safe access - even read-only - in a concurrent setup such as the rpmdb requires locking. Bad things happening when you kill -9 a process while its blocking signals to protect critical sections is not a bug.