Crash (computing) - Application Crashes

Application Crashes

An application typically crashes when it performs an operation which is not allowed by the operating system. The operating system then triggers an exception or signal in the application. Unix applications traditionally responded to the signal by dumping core. Most Windows and Unix GUI applications respond by displaying a dialog box (such as the one shown to the right) with the option to attach a debugger if one is installed. This behavior is called "crashing". Some applications attempt to recover from the error and continue execution instead of crashing.

Typical errors that result in application crashes include:

• attempting to read or write memory that is not allocated for reading or writing by that application (segmentation fault) or x86 specific (general protection fault)
• attempting to execute privileged or invalid instructions
• attempting to perform I/O operations on hardware devices to which it does not have permission to access
• passing invalid arguments to system calls
• attempting to access other system resources to which the application does not have permission to access (bus error)
• attempting to execute machine instructions with bad arguments (depending on CPU architecture): divide by zero, operations on denorms or NaN values, memory access to unaligned addresses, etc.