libthr and main thread stack size

[Ivan A. Kosarev]

On 08/08/2014 09:28 AM, Konstantin Belousov wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 07, 2014 at 04:18:12PM +0400, Ivan A. Kosarev wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> According to libthr's thr_init.c (the 9.2 version) init_main_thread()
>> allocates s.c. "red zone" below the main stack in order to protect other
>> stacks. The size of the main stack is determined by the
>> _thr_stack_initial variable that is declared extern though it doesn't
>> seem it can be changed. The value of the variable is set to 4M on 64-bit
>> platforms which is obviously not sufficient for the most of real programs.
>>
>> Can anyone please confirm that there is no way to increase the stack
>> size for the main thread and thus any program linked against libthr has
>> only a few megabytes of stack memory for its main thread--whatever the
>> system stack size (ulimit -s) is set to?
> Yes, there is no way to change the main thread stack clamping.
> Could you provide a reasonable use case for the 4MB stack ?

Traversing trees with recursive functions or on-stack grammar parsers?

>
> Anyway, I somewhat sympathize to the idea to stop clamping the main
> thread stack, and to not reuse it for other threads stack carving.
> This also means that non-main threads stack allocator should stop
> tracking the explicit location for the stacks and rely on vm mmap(2)
> base selection instead.

Yes, that would solve the problem.

> I do not know the motivations why the current scheme of stacks allocation
> was chosen.  The changes do not look too involved.

Thanks a lot.

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