Debugging SIGBUS on x86 Linux

Question

What can cause SIGBUS (bus error) on a generic x86 userland application in Linux? All of the discussion I\'ve been able to find online is regarding memory alignment errors,

Answer 1

This was briefly mentioned above as a "failed IO request", but I'll expand upon it a bit.

A frequent case is when you lazily grow a file using ftruncate, map it into memory, start writing data and then run out of space in your filesystem. Physical space for mapped file is allocated on page faults, if there's none left then process receives a SIGBUS.

If you need your application to correctly recover from this error, it makes sense to explicitly reserve space prior to mmap using fallocate. Handling ENOSPC in errno after fallocate call is much simpler than dealing with signals, especially in a multi-threaded application.