Question

I am trying to create a shared memory segment containing three integers and an array. The segment is created and a pointer is attached, but when I try to access the values of the variables (whether changing, printing, etc.) I get a segmentation fault.

Here is the code I tried:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdbool.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/ipc.h>
#include <sys/sem.h>
#include <sys/shm.h>

#define SIZE 10

    int* shm_front;
    int* shm_end;
    int* shm_count;
    int* shm_array;
    int shm_size = 3*sizeof(int) + sizeof(int[SIZE]);

int main(int argc, char* argsv[])
{
    int shmid;

    //create shared memory segment
    if((shmid = shmget(IPC_PRIVATE, shm_size, 0644)) == -1)
    {
        printf("error in shmget");
        exit(1);
    }

    //obtain the pointer to the segment
    if((shm_front  = (int*)shmat(shmid, (void *)0, 0)) == (void *)-1)
    {
        printf("error in shmat");
        exit(1);
    }
    //move down the segment to set the other pointers
    shm_end = shm_front + 1;
    shm_count = shm_front + 2;
    shm_array = shm_front + 3;

//tests on shm
*shm_end = 10;                //gives segmentation fault
printf("\n%d", *shm_end);   //gives segmentation fault

           //clean-up
    //get rid of shared memory
    shmdt(shm_front);
    shmctl(shmid, IPC_RMID, NULL);

    printf("\n\n");
    return 0;
}

I tried accessing the shared memory by dereferencing the pointer to the struct, but got a segmentation fault each time.

Thanks everyone, no segmentation faults now.

Answer 1

In your code, you didn’t include sys/shm.h, which should cause your compiler to spit out these:

warning: implicit declaration of function ‘shmget’
warning: implicit declaration of function ‘shmat’
warning: implicit declaration of function ‘shmdt’
warning: implicit declaration of function ‘shmctl’

Casting the return value of shmat to an int * will also hide this warning:

warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast

What may happen here is that since the shmat isn’t defined, the compiler will implicitly have it return an int instead of a void *. If the address returned by it doesn’t fit in a signed integer, you’ll get a integer overflow which is undefined behavior, and will most likely cause a segmentation fault for accessing an unallocated memory location.

You shouldn’t cast the return value of a function returning void * specifically to catch those errors (and always compile with warnings enabled, too).