Is there a point to trapping “segfault”?

Question

I know that, given enough context, one could hope to use constructively (i.e. recover) from a segfault condition.

But, is the effort worth it? If yes, in w

Answer 1

There are very advanced techniques that one might implementing by catching a segmentation fault, if you know the segmentation fault isn't an error. For example, you can protect pages so that you can't read from them, and then trap the SIGSEGV to perform "magical" behavior before the read completes. (See Tomasz Węgrzanowski "Segfaulting own programs for fun and profit" for an example of what you might do, but usually the overhead is pretty high so it's not worth doing.)

A similar principle applies to catching trapping an illegal instruction exception (usually in the kernel) to emulate an instruction that's not implemented on your processor.