Re: top stack (l)users for 2.5.69

William Lee Irwin III
2003-05-07T14:36:08Z

On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 03:56:57PM +0200, J?rn Engel wrote:
>> Agreed, partially. There is the current issue of the kernel stack
>> being just 8k in size and no decent mechanism in place to detect a
>> stack overflow. And there is (arguably) the future issue of the kernel
>> stack shrinking to 4k.

On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 04:33:15PM +0200, Torsten Landschoff wrote:
> Pardon my ignorance, but why is the kernel stack shrinked to just a few
> kilobytes? With 256MB of RAM in a typical desktop system it shouldn't
> be a problem to use 256KB from that as the stack, but I am sure there
> are good reasons to shrink it.
> Just curious, thanks for any info

The kernel stack is (in Linux) unswappable memory that persists
throughout the lifetime of a thread. It's basically how many threads
you want to be able to cram into a system, and it matters a lot for
32-bit.

-- wli