stack management

Posted Aug 18, 2010 23:14 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
In reply to: stack management by pflugstad
Parent article: An ancient kernel hole is closed

> And this is causing some problems with some applications that probably pay way to much attention than they should to the stack allocation.

If I read the discussion correctly, said application does not pay attention to the stack allocation in particular. Instead, it parses the information about all of its own mappings from /proc and mlock()s each one of them, instead of just using mlockall(). When the mlock() hit the guard page, it extended the stack mapping down by one page, which then confused said application when it later parsed again the mapping information from /proc (since the mappings were now different from what it had read before).

The fix was just to hide the extra guard page from /proc.