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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.
The operating system delays loading parts of the program from disk until the program attempts to use it and the page fault is generated. If the page is not loaded in memory at the time of the fault, then it is called a major or hard page fault. The page fault handler in the OS needs to find a free location: either a free page in memory, or a ...
A segmentation fault can also occur in the middle of a page, by overwriting a sentinel or other data, which is why writing one element beyond an array's limit can cause crashes (segfaults) and why mallocing a few bytes doesn't mean you can use all addresses rounded up to the next page.
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. Some OSes used that for swapping, but under Linux this generates SIGBUS.
Then faults go up dramatically and the time spent resolving them overwhelms time spent on the computing the program was written to do. This condition is referred to as thrashing. Thrashing occurs on a program that works with huge data structures, as its large working set causes continual page faults that drastically slow down the system.
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.
Earthquakes are common on the West Coast, with multiple plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault making geologic activity more likely. They are rarer on the East Coast, but they do happen ...
[7] [8] For example, a stack buffer overflow can overwrite the return address of a subroutine with an invalid value, which will cause, e.g., a segmentation fault, when the subroutine returns. However, if an exploit overwrites the return address with a valid value, the code in that address will be executed.