pthread_attr_setguardsize(3THR)

pthread_attr_setguardsize(3THR) sets the guardsize of the attr object.

The guardsize argument provides protection against overflow of the stack pointer. If a thread's stack is created with guard protection, the implementation allocates extra memory at the overflow end of the stack as a buffer against stack overflow of the stack pointer. If an application overflows into this buffer an error results (possibly in a SIGSEGV signal being delivered to the thread).

The guardsize attribute is provided to the application for two reasons:

1. Overflow protection can potentially result in wasted system resources. An application that creates a large number of threads, and knows its threads will never overflow their stack, can save system resources by turning off guard areas.

2. When threads allocate large data structures on stack, a large guard area may be needed to detect stack overflow.

If guardsize is zero, a guard area will not be provided for threads created with attr. If guardsize is greater than zero, a guard area of at least size guardsize bytes is provided for each thread created with attr. By default, a thread has an implementation-defined, non-zero guard area.

A conforming implementation is permitted to round up the value contained in guardsize to a multiple of the configurable system variable PAGESIZE (see PAGESIZE in sys/mman.h). If an implementation rounds up the value of guardsize to a multiple of PAGESIZE, a call to pthread_attr_getguardsize() specifying attr will store, in guardsize, the guard size specified in the previous call to pthread_attr_setguardsize().

#include <pthread.h>

int pthread_attr_setguardsize(pthread_attr_t *attr, size_t  guardsize);

Return Value

pthread_attr_setguardsize() fails if:

EINVAL

The argument attr is invalid, the argument guardsize is invalid, or the argument guardsize contains an invalid value.