Crash when reaching the end of executable

Question

I have an executable that crashes after main has finished all its instructions, and the last assembler instruction is executed. Just before the program crashes, I do disas on GDB:

   0x2001c054 <+84>:    movt    r3, #16384      ; 0x4000
   0x2001c058 <+88>:    ldrh    r3, [r3, #16]
   0x2001c05a <+90>:    uxth    r3, r3
   0x2001c05c <+92>:    str     r3, [sp, #0]
   0x2001c05e <+94>:    bl      0x2001c0f8 <scream>
   0x2001c062 <+98>:    mov.w   r3, #0
   0x2001c066 <+102>:   mov     r0, r3
   0x2001c068 <+104>:   add     sp, #28
=> 0x2001c06a <+106>:   pop     {pc}
End of assembler dump.

Now if I go to the next instruction (ni in GDB) I get the following in GDB:

0xfffffffe in ?? ()

Also, OpenOCD (which I use to communicate with my STM32F2 board) gives the following error:

Error: address + size wrapped(0xfffffffe, 0x00000004)

How can I tell my executable to exit gracefully?

Answer 1

Is this on a microcontroller? If so, you should never exit main() - use an infinite loop instead.

Answer 2

If this is an operating system or other app on the bare metal, main should never exit. If you really must exit, then your C startup code could reset the board after main.