What is a segmentation fault?

Question

What is a segmentation fault? Is it different in C and C++? How are segmentation faults and dangling pointers related?

Answer 1

It would be worth noting that segmentation fault isn't caused by directly accessing another process memory (this is what I'm hearing sometimes), as it is simply not possible. With virtual memory every process has its own virtual address space and there is no way to access another one using any value of pointer. Exception to this can be shared libraries which are same physical address space mapped to (possibly) different virtual addresses and kernel memory which is even mapped in the same way in every process (to avoid TLB flushing on syscall, I think). And things like shmat ;) - these are what I count as 'indirect' access. One can, however, check that they are usually located long way from process code and we are usually able to access them (this is why they are there, nevertheless accessing them in a improper way will produce segmentation fault).

Still, segmentation fault can occur in case of accessing our own (process) memory in improper way (for instance trying to write to non-writable space). But the most common reason for it is the access to the part of the virtual address space that is not mapped to physical one at all.

And all of this with respect to virtual memory systems.

Answer 2

Segmentation fault is a specific kind of error caused by accessing memory that “does not belong to you.” It’s a helper mechanism that keeps you from corrupting the memory and introducing hard-to-debug memory bugs. Whenever you get a segfault you know you are doing something wrong with memory – accessing a variable that has already been freed, writing to a read-only portion of the memory, etc. Segmentation fault is essentially the same in most languages that let you mess with memory management, there is no principal difference between segfaults in C and C++.

There are many ways to get a segfault, at least in the lower-level languages such as C(++). A common way to get a segfault is to dereference a null pointer:

int *p = NULL; *p = 1; 

Another segfault happens when you try to write to a portion of memory that was marked as read-only:

char *str = "Foo"; // Compiler marks the constant string as read-only *str = 'b'; // Which means this is illegal and results in a segfault 

Dangling pointer points to a thing that does not exist anymore, like here:

char *p = NULL; {     char c;     p = &c; } // Now p is dangling 

The pointer p dangles because it points to the character variable c that ceased to exist after the block ended. And when you try to dereference dangling pointer (like *p='A'), you would probably get a segfault.