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In computing, a segmentation fault (often shortened to segfault) or access violation is a fault, or failure condition, raised by hardware with memory protection, notifying an operating system (OS) the software has attempted to access a restricted area of memory (a memory access violation).
On x86 there exists an older memory management mechanism known as segmentation.If the application loads a segment register with the selector of a non-present segment (which under POSIX-compliant OSes can only be done with assembly language), the exception is generated.
In a system using segmentation, computer memory addresses consist of a segment id and an offset within the segment. [3] A hardware memory management unit (MMU) is responsible for translating the segment and offset into a physical address, and for performing checks to make sure the translation can be done and that the reference to that segment and offset is permitted.
Protection may encompass all accesses to a specified area of memory, write accesses, or attempts to execute the contents of the area. An attempt to access unauthorized [a] memory results in a hardware fault, e.g., a segmentation fault, storage violation exception, generally causing abnormal termination of the offending process.
Illegal accesses and invalid page faults can result in a segmentation fault or bus error, resulting in an app or OS crash. Software bugs are often the causes of these problems, but hardware memory errors, such as those caused by overclocking, may corrupt pointers and cause valid code to fail.
Error-correcting codes are usually distinguished between convolutional codes and block codes: Convolutional codes are processed on a bit-by-bit basis. They are particularly suitable for implementation in hardware, and the Viterbi decoder allows optimal decoding. Block codes are processed on a block-by-block basis.
This is in contrast to package decay-induced soft errors, which do not change with location. [5] As chip density increases, Intel expects the errors caused by cosmic rays to increase and become a limiting factor in design. [4] The average rate of cosmic-ray soft errors is inversely proportional to sunspot activity.
A hardware abstraction layer (HAL) is an abstraction layer, implemented in software, between the physical hardware of a computer and the software that runs on that computer. . Its function is to hide differences in hardware from most of the operating system kernel, so that most of the kernel-mode code does not need to be changed to run on systems with different hardwa