[quote user="Anthony F. Seely"]The Hercules part is a Cortex R series and this doesn't have virtual memory so the data abort means something more like a critical system error rather than perhaps something else in a bigger system. [/quote]
I'm assuming he's getting an external fault from a peripheral, so I think that would work the same on the Cortex-R ? Exceptions from the virtual memory system would result in a SIGSEGV (and a useful stack trace, since those exceptions are always synchronous), not a SIGBUS.
EDIT: I misread his original post, I'm now not sure what he means since I think SIGABRT is only triggered by software (e.g. abort()), no "data abort" or anything else processor-specific about that at all.