bus error

processor A fatal failure in the execution of a machinelanguage instruction resulting from the processor detecting

an anomalous condition on its bus. Such conditions include

invalid address alignment (accessing a multi-byte number at an

odd address), accessing a physical address that does not

correspond to any device, or some other device-specific

hardware error. A bus error triggers a processor-level

exception which Unix translates into a "SIGBUS" signal

which, if not caught, will terminate the current process.

(2000-04-04)