-
When Invalid Memory Addresses Start Responding: The Hidden Chaos Beneath Modern Computing
Modern systems are designed around one basic promise: invalid memory addresses should never respond. When a program dereferences a pointer that belongs to no allocated region, the operating system is supposed to intervene immediately with a segmentation fault. End of story. Except… sometimes that promise breaks.And when it does, the consequences are far worse…
-
Zombie Processes: Dead Code That Still Haunts the System
In operating systems, not every threat is loud. Some are silent, subtle, and buried deep in the process table. Zombie processes fall exactly into that category: tasks that have already finished execution but refuse to disappear. They’re technically dead, yet still present a residue of poor process management that can grow into a system-wide…
-
Kernel Locking and Concurrency Pitfalls in Operating Systems
In modern operating systems, concurrency isn’t optional — it’s fundamental. Multiple threads and processes access shared resources constantly: memory, I/O, scheduling queues, filesystem metadata. Without strict synchronization, the kernel becomes a war zone of race conditions, data corruption, and unpredictable crashes. The kernel sits at the lowest level of control. If a locking mistake…