Handling Illegal Accesses and Invalid Page Faults
Illegal accesses and invalid page faults can result in a program crash, segmentation error, bus error or core dump depending on the operating system environment. Often these problems are caused by software bugs, but hardware memory errors, such as those caused by overclocking, may corrupt pointers and make correct software fail.
Operating systems such as Windows and UNIX (and other UNIX-like systems) provide differing mechanisms for reporting errors caused by page faults. Windows uses structured exception handling to report page fault-based invalid accesses as access violation exceptions, and UNIX (and UNIX-like) systems typically use signals, such as SIGSEGV, to report these error conditions to programs.
If the program receiving the error does not handle it, the operating system performs a default action, typically involving the termination of the running process that caused the error condition, and notifying the user that the program has malfunctioned. Recent versions of Windows often report such problems by simply stating something like "this program must close" (an experienced user or programmer with access to a debugger can still retrieve detailed information). Recent Windows versions also write a minidump (similar in principle to a core dump) describing the state of the crashed process. UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems report these conditions to the user with error messages such as "segmentation violation", or "bus error", and may also produce a core dump.
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