[bregma]

The granularity of virtual address mapping is usually a page. On many systems, that's 4 kilobytes of address space. In order to trigger a fault when the address 0x0000000000000000 is dereferenced, it's necessary to map the entire address range from 0x0000000000000000 to 0x0000000000000fff to the same faulting behaviour.

That's a waste of a page.

[PhilipRoman]

Yeah but there is no "page" there. Assuming a process starts with an empty page table (meaning every single address will segfault), you don't have to do anything else to get the crashing behaviour for null.

Unless you're talking about some kind of device which supports virtual memory, but also by default sets up mappings, including at 0 which seems weird to me.

[bregma]

So if I have an empty page table 0x00000001 can be referenced as a valid address?

Memory mapping on all hardware with which I am familiar (which is not a small integer) is done by pages. If you have to fault on one address in a page (eg. zero page, stack canaries, heap guards) you have to fault on every single address in that page. But "memory is cheap". Until it's not.

[chuckadams]

Any system where losing one page would be too dear is likely not using a MMU in the first place.

Besides, memory access is twice as fast on the zero page! Wait, you're telling me the 6502 isn't the standard anymore? ;p