[saghm]

If I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, the memory location with address 0 is actually a writable address, but with the value being used semantically to handle division by zero? It's kind of wild to me that would even something that's even allowed to be done manually, let alone required by a certain mode. Is this something provided for compatibility reasons that you'd have to opt into, or is it just something enabled by default?

[lmm]

Which part is wild? "Magic" memory addresses are a fairly normal way to communicate with hardware; nowadays there are more layers to how you set up mappings in the MMU etc., but in the old days it was normal for everything to just have a fixed address (e.g. I remember back on the Apple ][ the screen's framebuffer was in a particular memory range, or rather two - to avoid tearing you'd draw on one and then flip which one it was using). And particularly for the CPU, it's hard to see how else it could do customizable interrupt handling - I guess you could have some kind of special API with dedicated CPU instructions or something for "programming" in an interrupt table, but that would be more complex and have no particular benefit. "It reads your table of pointers from this address in memory, in this format" is pretty straightforward and easy to use.

As for why it's address 0, well, it has to go somewhere, every machine has a CPU so everyone needs an interrupt table even if they don't have much memory. And when memory was precious there was no sense wasting even one byte of it; 0 was a real address on your physical memory chip, so why not use it just like any other?

(The fact that it's "address 0" for "division by 0" is just coincidence as far as I can see; division by 0 just happens to be the first kind of possible CPU interrupt. Perhaps it was the most common one?)

[saghm]

The part that surprised me is that this would be the way things worked on a modern C++ compiler without any special flags. The article is about C++, and using "magic" memory addresses doesn't seem at all what I'd expect to be the default way to handle division by zero.

From the numerous responses here, it's clear that people interpret my question as about how the hardware itself works, which isn't at all what I was asking about; I'm aware of how stuff like this works at the assembly level, but my understanding was that in C and C++, trying to write arbitrarily to "special" addresses like that would be considered undefined behavior (often resulting in segfaults). When I read the comment I responded to above, it surprised me, so I wanted to check whether I understood what was said correctly. It's honestly kind of confusing to me that so many people seem very upset by the idea that a stranger on the internet might have a misconception about how hardware abstractions are exposed via compiled code to the point that they feel the need to explain in detail how hardware works but not actually answer the question I asked.

[mkup]

The difference between modern days and days of DOS isn't in C/C++ compiler, it's in virtual memory and address space isolation and privilege isolation. So it's not a job of a C/C++ compiler to enforce protection from writing to "special" addresses, because interrupt table updates (and memory-mapped hardware I/O in general) still must happen somewhere (i.e. in kernel, hypervisor, drivers etc) and that code is still written in C/C++, same as in the DOS era.

[sargstuff]

Mmmm..;. job of modern OS is to use/manage MMU. Prior to DEC, OS just automated version of human feeding punch cards/spooling up tape.

DEC provided the necessary hardware MMU to do actual real time multi-processing/multi-user access in feasibile/practical manner.

[lmm]

> The article is about C++, and using "magic" memory addresses doesn't seem at all what I'd expect to be the default way to handle division by zero.

They're not saying this is, like, a portable standard way to handle division by zero in C++. You're right that it would be undefined behaviour under the standard (but a C++ compiler for real-mode x86 would be expected to support it, at least implicitly; obviously this specific case is not a particularly useful, but C++ is used in embedded settings and setting a custom interrupt handler is something its users want and expect).

A decent, well-behaved language would do some kind of structured error handling on divide by zero, like throwing an exception. IMO that includes any C++ compiler worth bothering with (though again the standard makes it undefined behaviour so it's possible that some compilers don't). But, the way the runtime of such a decent C++ compiler would actually implement that would be by setting up an interrupt handler for the divide by zero interrupt (that would contain code to construct the exception etc.), and by performing this write to address 0 you're overwriting (the pointer to) that interrupt handler. So, this line of code would cause your program to behave (almost certainly) badly on the next division by zero, even if you were using a well-behaved C++ compiler that normally handled division by zero gracefully.

(OTOH with a maliciously pedantic C++ compiler that division by zero would already be undefined behaviour, so in practice, since most C++ compilers tend to be maliciously pedantic, you might be no worse off than you were before that line).

The original post you replied to was just talking about the somewhat interesting details of what would actually happen because of the quirks of what these addresses are used for on that hardware (e.g. the fact that address 0 is supposed to contain a pointer to the handler, so by setting it to 0 you cause the CPU to start executing the interrupt handler table as code, is kind of interesting - not as a point about C++, but as a point about funny emergent behaviour of hardware), not about what this is specified as doing or the normal way of doing things in C++. I don't know why you were downvoted.

[sargstuff]

> ".. the fact that address 0 is supposed to contain a pointer to the handler .."

What got missed though, is ther has to be an "unused"/"reserve" bit(s) space in order for things to run without requiring additional specific hardware operations.

[wvenable]

Back in the day there were no protections. You could write to any address whether it was used by the CPU for interrupt vectors, part of the OS, hardware addresses, anything.

[saghm]

Sure, but I'm asking if that's something that's enabled by default today or not. I don't see why it's unreasonable for things that were useful "back in the day" to not be available with the default arguments on current versions of compilers but available with certain flags. I'm not sure why my question touched a nerve, because I'm genuinely asking both if I understand correctly and if it's something that needs a flag to enable.

[wvenable]

In older CPUs there was no memory management hardware and no virtual memory. You could just read/write in code from any address anywhere and you'd be writing to that actual physical memory in the computer. This wasn't a feature so much as it is a lack of a feature.

Modern CPUs with virtual memory means the question is a lot more complicated. Every process in a modern OS gets it's own address space so you can write to 0 but it could go anywhere (even virtualized to disk) and all the actual hardware is not directly accessible (must go through the OS).

I'm not sure I'd call this ability "useful" except if you're writing an operating system. This is vast simplification but when your computer boots it's effectively in a mode that allows reading/writing to anywhere. The OS kernel has direct access to all the hardware and then it limits access when running user processes.

[sargstuff]

pre-MMU, unless using DEC box.

[inkyoto]

It is still true even today for microcontrollers – many of them come with a miniscule amount of RAM, no MMU and generally unpredictable memory maps.

[layer8]

Think of it as part of the “API” of the CPU that a program can make use of however it likes. In the early days (for DOS and the like), the distinction between operating system and application was more one of convention and not enforced by hardware mechanisms. The program was supposed to control the hardware, and not the other way around.

[HansHamster]

The interrupt vector table on x86 sits by default at 0000:0000 and the CPU uses it to handle interrupts and other exceptions by jumping to the address entry corresponding to the event. Entry 0 is division by 0, but there are also entries for illegal instruction, hardware interrupts and so on.

The address can be changed with the LIDT instruction and operating systems nowadays will just put it wherever, but for backward compatibility it is expected to still be at 0000:0000 (not sure how this is handled nowadays in UEFI, but it should still be possible t o set it up that way).

[marcosdumay]

The kernel can write almost anywhere. (Well, actually, nothing can write on most addresses in a 64 bits machine, but if it's usable for something, the kernel can use it directly.)

And yes, some addresses are special. (AFAIK, on all current mainstream architectures.) This is the expected way to set those signal handlers, output (and input) data, configure devices, etc.

That said, there are some gotchas on using specific addresses in C. AFAIK none apply to x86, but it's something you usually do in assembly.