I've investigated this crash further, and I think it may be due to Octave linking against LLVM 3.3 while the Mesa software direct rendering drivers are linked against LLVM 3.4. A locally-built Octave without the experimental JIT (not linked to LLVM) does not crash in the same way.
In addition to using gnuplot, another workaround that works for me is to disable direct rendering:
I've investigated this crash further, and I think it may be due to Octave linking against LLVM 3.3 while the Mesa software direct rendering drivers are linked against LLVM 3.4. A locally-built Octave without the experimental JIT (not linked to LLVM) does not crash in the same way.
In addition to using gnuplot, another workaround that works for me is to disable direct rendering:
$ export LIBGL_ALWAYS_ INDIRECT= y
$ octave
octave:1> plot (...