In computing, a segmentation fault (often shortened to segfault) or access violation is a failure condition raised by hardware with memory protection, notifying an operating system (OS) that the software has attempted to access a restricted area of memory (a memory access violation). On standard x86 computers, this is a form of general protection fault. The operating system 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 (a program crash), and sometimes a core dump. Segmentation faults are a common class of error in programs written in languages that support pointers that can be null, or that can be set to an arbitrary value, or that support arrays, and in which few to no memory checks are performed. They arise primarily due to errors in use of pointers for virtual memory addressing. 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 have mechanisms designed to help programmers avoid using segmentation faults in their program and improve checking of hardware that has memory protection. For example, Rust employs an ownership-based model to try to ensure checking for 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 (for example, attempting to write to a read-only location, or to overwrite part of the operating system). The term "segmentation" has various uses in computing; in the context of "segmentation fault", 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 allocated in the const segment 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, violates the program's segmentation, 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 (hence no page fault), 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 (MMU) on illegal access (if the referenced memory exists), as part of its memory protection feature, or an invalid page fault (if the referenced memory does not exist). 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 (abbreviated from segmentation violation) 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 (e.g., dereferencing a null pointer), while in other cases the bug can be difficult to reproduce and depend on memory allocation on each run (e.g., dereferencing a dangling pointer). The following are some typical causes of a segmentation fault:
Attempting to access a nonexistent memory address (outside process's address space) Attempting to access memory the program does not have rights to (such as kernel structures in process context) Attempting to write read-only memory (such as code segment) These in turn are often caused by programming errors that result in invalid memory access:
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