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Why some Segmentation Faults are non-deterministic and how you would approach debugging them?

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Non-deterministic segmentation faults occur due to unpredictable events like race conditions, memory corruption or uninitialized variables. Debugging these can be challenging as they don’t consistently reproduce.

To debug, I’d first try to isolate the problem by narrowing down the code section causing the fault. This could involve commenting out sections of code and observing if the fault still occurs.

Next, I would use a debugging tool such as GDB (GNU Debugger) to step through the program execution line by line. This allows me to inspect variable values at each step and identify where things go wrong.

If the issue is suspected to be a race condition, tools like Helgrind or DRD from Valgrind suite can help detect it. They report on data races that happen between threads which might cause non-deterministic behavior.

For memory-related issues, Memcheck, another tool from Valgrind suite, can be used. It helps in detecting memory leaks and overflows which might lead to segmentation faults.

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