Assembly segmentation fault after making a system call, at the end of my code
I was experimenting and have the following assembly code, which works very well, except that I get a "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" message right before my program ends:
GLOBAL _start
%define ___STDIN 0
%define ___STDOUT 1
%define ___SYSCALL_WRITE 0x04
segment .data
segment .rodata
L1 db "hello World", 10, 0
segment .bss
segment .text
_start:
mov eax, ___SYSCALL_WRITE
mov ebx, ___STDOUT
mov ecx, L1
mov edx, 13
int 0x80
It doesn't matter whether or not I have ret
at the end; I still get the message.
What's the problem?
I'm using x86 and nasm.
You can't ret
from start; it isn't a function and there's no return address on the stack. The stack pointer points at argc
on process entry.
As n.m. said in the comments, the issue is that you aren't exiting the program, so execution runs off into garbage code and you get a segfault.
What you need is:
;; Linux 32-bit x86
%define ___SYSCALL_EXIT 1
// ... at the end of _start:
mov eax, ___SYSCALL_EXIT
mov ebx, 0
int 0x80
(The above is 32-bit code. In 64-bit code you want mov eax, 231
(exit_group) / syscall
, with the exit status in EDI. For example:
;; Linux x86-64
xor edi, edi ; or mov edi, eax if you have a ret val in EAX
mov eax, 231 ; __NR_exit_group
syscall