How programmatically get Linux process's stack start and end address?

Question

For a mono threaded program, I want to check whether or not a given virtual address is in the process\'s stack. I want to do that inside the process which is written in C.

Answer 1

My answer is for linux on x64 with kernel 3.12.23 only. It might or might not apply to aother versions or architectures.

(1)+(2) I'm not sure here, but I believe it is as Gil Hamilton said before.

(3) You can see the amount in /proc/pid/maps (or /proc/self/maps if you target the calling process). However not all of that it actually useable as stack for your application. Argument- (argv[]) and environment vectors (__environ[]) usually consume quite a bit of space at the bottom (highest address) of that area.

To actually find the area the kernel designated as "stack" for your application, you can have a look at /proc/self/stat. Its values are documented here. As you can see, there is a field for "startstack". Together with the size of the mapped area, you can compute the current amount of stack reserved. Along with "kstkesp", you could determine the amount of free stack space or actually used stack space (keep in mind that any operation done by your thread most likely will change those values).

Also note, that this works only for the processes main thread! Other threads won't get a labled "[stack]" mapping, but either use anonymous mappings or might even end up on the heap. (Use pthreads API to find those values, or remember the stack-start in the threads main function).

(4) As explained in (3), you solution is mostly OK, but not entirely accurate.