Explaining segmentation fault errors

Want to fix that segfault you keep hitting or was reported to you? The first step is to understand the error message you get.

So you have a message like the following:
segfault at bfea3fec ip 080ee07e sp bfea3fa0 error 6

You might already know that ip means instruction pointer and sp means stack pointer and as such the addresses that follow them are the values in those registers. But what does the error number mean?

The error number, or code, actually gives you a better explanation of what the cause of the segfault is. The number's bits are flags describing the error and are architecture-dependent. For x86/x86_64 I just wrote an online converter/decoder that you can use to explain the segfault error code.

As an example, the above error code is explained as:

The cause was a user-mode write resulting in no page being found.

And the common error 4:

The cause was a user-mode read resulting in no page being found.

(also known as a null pointer dereference).

Enjoy.