[Vm-dev] Re: [Pharo-dev] On things we do when our stack overflows

Stefan Marr smalltalk at stefan-marr.de
Tue Feb 18 15:30:44 UTC 2014


Hi:

On 18 Feb 2014, at 15:58, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven at stfx.eu> wrote:

> The VM could sure use stack overflow protection, it would/could help catch numerous 'hangs' due to infinite loops.
> 
> On 18 Feb 2014, at 13:08, Sebastian Sastre <sebastian at flowingconcept.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi there,
>> 
>> Toyota shoot its foot and learnt how not to anymore.
>> 
>> This is a nice read on the things our software do when the stack overflows.
>> Are We Shooting Ourselves in the Foot with Stack Overflow?
>> http://embeddedgurus.com/state-space/2014/02/are-we-shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot-with-stack-overflow/
>> 
>> The question on the table is 
>> 
>> are we following time proven safety rules when the same thing happen to our VM?

From the top of my head, I would expect operating systems for non-embedded devises to allocate a protected page at the end of the stack to detect stack overflows.
And, most of the standard OSes should use Address Space Layout Randomization, which you need to turn off explicitly if you actually want to make sure that your stack is at a predefined position.

I think, this article is really targeted towards embedded systems, where you might not even got a MMU.

And, if you are interested in those things, it might be best to follow Eliot’s suggestion and discuss it on the VM list.

Best regards
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Marr
INRIA Lille - Nord Europe
http://stefan-marr.de/research/





More information about the Vm-dev mailing list