Unreachable code in assembly

Question

I'm debugging a crash in linux, and am going through the assembly of the function cxa_finalize

The crash happens on a source line that appears unreachable:

cmp    %edx,%esi             // f >= &funcs->fns[0]
jae    0xb6e17b88            // enter for loop
jmp    0xb6e17c08            // exit for loop
lea    0x0(%esi,%eiz,1),%esi // crashes here - how do we even get here since there is a 
                             // jmp above us, and nothing jumps to here
cmp    %edi,0xc(%esi)        // d == f->func.cxa.dso_handle (jumped to from below)

later on in this method, there is another lea 0x0(%esi,%eiz,1),%esi instruction that appears after a jmp and nop that also appears unreachable. In that case, the jmp is also exiting a for loop.

Is there some paradigm going on here that puts in unreachable instructions?

Edit: Turns out it wasn't crashing on the lea instruction, but on the cmp instruction after it, when accessing the memory at esi.

Answer 1

I found the answer here

Sometimes GCC inserts NOP instructions into the code stream to ensure proper alignment and stuff like that. The NOP instruction takes one byte, so you would think that you could just add as many as needed. But according to Ian Lance Taylor, it’s faster for the chip to execute one long instruction than many short instructions. So rather than inserting seven NOP instructions, they instead use one bizarro LEA, which uses up seven bytes and is semantically equivalent to a NOP