Re: [PATCH v2 00/13] Dynamic Kernel Stacks

Dave Hansen
2026-04-24T22:21:31Z

On 4/24/26 14:35, Pasha Tatashin wrote:
> On 04-24 12:41, Dave Hansen wrote:
>> On 4/24/26 12:14, David Stevens wrote:
>>> The question is then: is this approach something that is fundamentally
>>> untenable in the kernel
>> Yes. Fundamentally untenable.
>>
>> Not allowing stack faults has been a wonderful simplification. It's one
>> of those things that just plain makes the kernel easier to maintain.
>> Saving low single digits of system memory is not exactly making me eager
>> to go back to the harder-to-maintain days.
>>
>> I seriously doubt that this 1% is the lowest hanging fruit for memory
>> bloat on these systems. 😉
> This true until, in a fleet of millions of machines, you encounter a
> one-in-a-billion chance of a stack overflow. You are then forced to
> double the statically allocated kernel stacks on every machine, paying a
> memory tax even though 99.999..% of threads never exceed 4K. This
> overhead accumulates to petabytes of wasted capacity.

I don't disagree with you. But, at that point, you're picking your
poison: bugs dynamic kernel stacks versus crashes from stack overflows.

At some point, I might be able to be talked into dynamic stack as a
FRED-only feature. But FRED isn't widespread enough to go to the trouble
today. I'm sure the folks who want this also don't want to wait until
all the devices in the field have FRED because that even *longer* off.

So maybe this is one of those things that folks just need to deploy
out-of-tree for a couple of years, come back with some data to show us
that we were just paranoid, and we'll look at it again.