According to the debug.log (P12), the bitcoind process terminated due to a failed memory allocation during a test with sequentially increasing block sizes. (it failed at 135MB).
A large block regression test which can reproduce this will be added, and the cause of the memory allocation failure needs to be investigated. The test was conducted on a machine with ample real, free memory, so it seems to be a case of the process exhausting some software limits.
ulimits in effect during the test:
core file size (blocks, -c) unlimited data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited scheduling priority (-e) 0 file size (blocks, -f) unlimited pending signals (-i) 257504 max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 64 max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited open files (-n) 1024 pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200 real-time priority (-r) 0 stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192 cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited max user processes (-u) 257504 virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited file locks (-x) unlimited