Re: [2.6 patch] i386: always use 4k stacks

Andrew Morton
2005-12-15T22:02:04Z

Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> wrote:
>
> This patch was already sent on:
> - 11 Dec 2005
> - 5 Dec 2005
> - 30 Nov 2005
> - 23 Nov 2005
> - 14 Nov 2005

Sigh. I saw the volume of email last time and though "gee, glad I wasn't
cc'ed on that lot".

Supporting 8k stacks is a small amount of code and nobody has seen a need
to make changes in there for quite a long time. So there's little cost to
keeping the existing code.

And the existing code is useful:

a) people can enable it to confirm that their weird crash was due to a
stack overflow.

b) If I was going to put together a maximally-stable kernel for a
complex server machine, I'd select 8k stacks. We're still just too
squeezy, and we've had too many relatively-recent overflows, and there
are still some really deep callpaths in there.