x86_64 printf segfault after brk call

Posted by gmb11 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by gmb11
Published on 2012-10-06T14:32:55Z Indexed on 2012/11/28 23:04 UTC
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While i was trying do use brk (int 0x80 with 45 in %rax) to implement a simple memory manager program in assembly and print the blocks in order, i kept getting segfault. After a while i could only reproduce the error, but have no idea why is this happening:

    .section    .data
    helloworld:
    .ascii  "hello world"
    .section    .text
    .globl      _start
_start:

    push    %rbp
    mov     %rsp, %rbp

    movq    $45, %rax  
    movq    $0, %rbx   #brk(0) should just return the current break of the programm
    int     $0x80

    #incq    %rax #segfault
    #addq    $1, %rax #segfault
    movq    $0, %rax #works fine?
    #addq    $1, %rax #segfault again?

    movq    $helloworld, %rdi
    call    printf

    movq    $1, %rax #exit
    int     $0x80

In the example here, if the commented lines are uncommented, i have a segfault, but some commands (like de movq $0, %rax) work just fine. In my other program, the first couple printf work, but the third crashes... Looking for other questions, i heard that printf sometimes allocates some memory, and that the brk shouldn't be used, because in this case it corrupts the heap or something... I'm very confused, does anyone know something about that?

EDIT: I've just found out that for printf to work you need %rax=0.

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