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

There are several good explanations of "Segmentation fault" in the answers, but since with segmentation fault often there's a dump of the memory content, I wanted to share where the relationship between the "core dumped" part in Segmentation fault (core dumped) and memory comes from:

From about 1955 to 1975 - before semiconductor memory - the dominant technology in computer memory used tiny magnetic doughnuts strung on copper wires. The doughnuts were known as "ferrite cores" and main memory thus known as "core memory" or "core".

Taken from here.

Answer 2

Wikipedia's Segmentation_fault page has a very nice description about it, just pointing out the causes and reasons. Have a look into the wiki for a detailed description.

In computing, a segmentation fault (often shortened to segfault) or access violation is a fault raised by hardware with memory protection, notifying an operating system (OS) about a memory access violation.

The following are some typical causes of a segmentation fault:

• Dereferencing NULL pointers – this is special-cased by memory management hardware
• 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:

• Dereferencing or assigning to an uninitialized pointer (wild pointer, which points to a random memory address)

• Dereferencing or assigning to a freed pointer (dangling pointer, which points to memory that has been freed/deallocated/deleted)

• A buffer overflow.

• A stack overflow.

• Attempting to execute a program that does not compile correctly. (Some compilers will output an executable file despite the presence of compile-time errors.)

Answer 3

Segmentation fault is also caused by hardware failures, in this case the RAM memories. This is the less common cause, but if you don't find an error in your code, maybe a memtest could help you.

The solution in this case, change the RAM.

edit:

Here there is a reference: Segmentation fault by hardware

Answer 4

Segmentation fault occurs when a process (running instance of a program) is trying to access read-only memory address or memory range which is being used by other process or access the non-existent (invalid) memory address. Dangling Reference (pointer) problem means that trying to access an object or variable whose contents have already been deleted from memory, e.g:

int *arr = new int[20];
delete arr;
cout<<arr[1];  //dangling problem occurs here

Answer 5

According to wikipedia:

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).

Answer 6

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 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 the memory management, there is no principial 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 any more, like here:

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

The pointer p dangles because it points to 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.