Building Your Own Stack

When you specify the thread stack size, you must account for the allocations needed by the invoked function and by each subsequent function called. The accounting should include calling sequence needs, local variables, and information structures.

Occasionally, you want a stack that differs a bit from the default stack. An obvious situation is when the thread needs more than the default stack size. A less obvious situation is when the default stack is too large. You might be creating thousands of threads with insufficient virtual memory to handle the gigabytes of stack space required by thousands of default stacks.

The limits on the maximum size of a stack are often obvious, but what about the limits on its minimum size? Sufficient stack space must exist to handle all stack frames that are pushed onto the stack, along with their local variables, and so on.

To get the absolute minimum limit on stack size, call the macro PTHREAD_STACK_MIN. The PTHREAD_STACK_MIN macro returns the amount of required stack space for a thread that executes a NULL procedure. Useful threads need more than the minimum stack size, so be very careful when reducing the stack size.