*BSD News Article 87073


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: What causes a bus error?
Date: 19 Jan 1997 22:15:37 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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scrantr@ix.netcom.com (Richard Scranton) wrote:

> The understanding I had was that (Sun SPARC, maybe DEC VAX too)
> SIGSEGV is caused by an out-of-arena memory access, while a SIGBUS
> is caused by a misaligned memory access on an architecture that
> traps to the monitor instead of transparently adding wait states
> and extra bus cycles.

Ah, yes, misaligned access is also a source for SIGBUS.  I forgot
about this, it's only poorly supported in the x86 arena anyway.  486+
offer misalignment traps, but only for the outermost `ring', i.e.
you'll never get it in kernel mode.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)