Segmentation fault


In computing, a segmentation fault or access violation is a fault, or failure condition, raised by hardware with memory protection, notifying an operating system the software has attempted to access a restricted area of memory. On standard x86 computers, this is a form of general protection fault. The OS kernel will, in response, usually perform some corrective action, generally passing the fault on to the offending process by sending the process a signal. Processes can in some cases install a custom signal handler, allowing them to recover on their own, but otherwise the OS default signal handler is used, generally causing abnormal termination of the process, and sometimes a core dump.
Segmentation faults are a common class of error in programs written in languages like C that provide low-level memory access. They arise primarily due to errors in use of pointers for virtual memory addressing, particularly illegal access. Another type of memory access error is a bus error, which also has various causes, but is today much rarer; these occur primarily due to incorrect physical memory addressing, or due to misaligned memory access – these are memory references that the hardware cannot address, rather than references that a process is not allowed to address.
Many programming languages may employ mechanisms designed to avoid segmentation faults and improve memory safety. For example, the Rust programming language employs an 'Ownership' based model to ensure memory safety. Other languages, such as Lisp and Java, employ garbage collection, which avoids certain classes of memory errors that could lead to segmentation faults.

Overview

A segmentation fault occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location that it is not allowed to access, or attempts to access a memory location in a way that is not allowed.
The term "segmentation" has various uses in computing; in the context of "segmentation fault", a term used since the 1950s, it refers to the address space of a program. With memory protection, only the program's own address space is readable, and of this, only the stack and the read/write portion of the data segment of a program are writable, while read-only data and the code segment are not writable. Thus attempting to read outside of the program's address space, or writing to a read-only segment of the address space, results in a segmentation fault, hence the name.
On systems using hardware memory segmentation to provide virtual memory, a segmentation fault occurs when the hardware detects an attempt to refer to a non-existent segment, or to refer to a location outside the bounds of a segment, or to refer to a location in a fashion not allowed by the permissions granted for that segment. On systems using only paging, an invalid page fault generally leads to a segmentation fault, and segmentation faults and page faults are both faults raised by the virtual memory management system. Segmentation faults can also occur independently of page faults: illegal access to a valid page is a segmentation fault, but not an invalid page fault, and segmentation faults can occur in the middle of a page, for example in a buffer overflow that stays within a page but illegally overwrites memory.
At the hardware level, the fault is initially raised by the memory management unit on illegal access, as part of its memory protection feature, or an invalid page fault. If the problem is not an invalid logical address but instead an invalid physical address, a bus error is raised instead, though these are not always distinguished.
At the operating system level, this fault is caught and a signal is passed on to the offending process, activating the process's handler for that signal. Different operating systems have different signal names to indicate that a segmentation fault has occurred. On Unix-like operating systems, a signal called SIGSEGV is sent to the offending process. On Microsoft Windows, the offending process receives a STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION exception.

Causes

The conditions under which segmentation violations occur and how they manifest themselves are specific to hardware and the operating system: different hardware raises different faults for given conditions, and different operating systems convert these to different signals that are passed on to processes. The proximate cause is a memory access violation, while the underlying cause is generally a software bug of some sort. Determining the root cause – debugging the bug – can be simple in some cases, where the program will consistently cause a segmentation fault, while in other cases the bug can be difficult to reproduce and depend on memory allocation on each run.
The following are some typical causes of a segmentation fault:
These in turn are often caused by programming errors that result in invalid memory access:
In C code, segmentation faults most often occur because of errors in pointer use, particularly in C dynamic memory allocation. Dereferencing a null pointer will always result in a segmentation fault, but wild pointers and dangling pointers point to memory that may or may not exist, and may or may not be readable or writable, and thus can result in transient bugs. For example:

char *p1 = NULL; // Null pointer
char *p2; // Wild pointer: not initialized at all.
char *p3 = malloc; // Initialized pointer to allocated memory
//
free; // p3 is now a dangling pointer, as memory has been freed

Now, dereferencing any of these variables could cause a segmentation fault: dereferencing the null pointer generally will cause a segfault, while reading from the wild pointer may instead result in random data but no segfault, and reading from the dangling pointer may result in valid data for a while, and then random data as it is overwritten.

Handling

The default action for a segmentation fault or bus error is abnormal termination of the process that triggered it. A core file may be generated to aid debugging, and other platform-dependent actions may also be performed. For example, Linux systems using the grsecurity patch may log SIGSEGV signals in order to monitor for possible intrusion attempts using buffer overflows.

Examples

Writing to read-only memory

Writing to read-only memory raises a segmentation fault. At the level of code errors, this occurs when the program writes to part of its own code segment or the read-only portion of the data segment, as these are loaded by the OS into read-only memory.
Here is an example of ANSI C code that will generally cause a segmentation fault on platforms with memory protection. It attempts to modify a string literal, which is undefined behavior according to the ANSI C standard. Most compilers will not catch this at compile time, and instead compile this to executable code that will crash:

int main

When the program containing this code is compiled, the string "hello world" is placed in the rodata section of the program executable file: the read-only section of the data segment. When loaded, the operating system places it with other strings and constant data in a read-only segment of memory. When executed, a variable, s, is set to point to the string's location, and an attempt is made to write an H character through the variable into the memory, causing a segmentation fault. Compiling such a program with a compiler that does not check for the assignment of read-only locations at compile time, and running it on a Unix-like operating system produces the following runtime error:

$ gcc segfault.c -g -o segfault
$./segfault
Segmentation fault

Backtrace of the core file from GDB:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x1c0005c2 in main at segfault.c:6
6 *s = 'H';

This code can be corrected by using an array instead of a character pointer, as this allocates memory on stack and initializes it to the value of the string literal:

char s = "hello world";
s = 'H'; // equivalently, *s = 'H';

Even though string literals should not be modified, in C they are of static char type, so there is no implicit conversion in the original code, while in C++ they are of static const char type, and thus there is an implicit conversion, so compilers will generally catch this particular error.

Null pointer dereference

In C and C-like languages, null pointers are used to mean "pointer to no object" and as an error indicator, and dereferencing a null pointer is a very common program error. The C standard does not say that the null pointer is the same as the pointer to memory address 0, though that may be the case in practice. Most operating systems map the null pointer's address such that accessing it causes a segmentation fault. This behavior is not guaranteed by the C standard. Dereferencing a null pointer is undefined behavior in C, and a conforming implementation is allowed to assume that any pointer that is dereferenced is not null.

int *ptr = NULL;
printf;

This sample code creates a null pointer, and then tries to access its value. Doing so causes a segmentation fault at runtime on many operating systems.
Dereferencing a null pointer and then assigning to it also usually causes a segmentation fault:

int *ptr = NULL;
  • ptr = 1;

The following code includes a null pointer dereference, but when compiled will often not result in a segmentation fault, as the value is unused and thus the dereference will often be optimized away by dead code elimination:

int *ptr = NULL;
  • ptr;

Buffer overflow

Stack overflow

Another example is recursion without a base case:

int main

which causes the stack to overflow which results in a segmentation fault. Infinite recursion may not necessarily result in a stack overflow depending on the language, optimizations performed by the compiler and the exact structure of a code. In this case, the behavior of unreachable code is undefined, so the compiler can eliminate it and use a tail call optimization that might result in no stack usage. Other optimizations could include translating the recursion into iteration, which given the structure of the example function would result in the program running forever, while probably not overflowing its stack.