Segfault on stack overflow

Question

Why does the linux kernel generate a segfault on stack overflow? This can make debugging very awkward when alloca in c or fortran creation of temporary arrays overflows. Sur

Answer 1

A stack overflow does not necessarily yield a crash. It may silently trash data of your program but continue to execute.

I wouldn't use SIGSEGV handler kludges but instead fix the original problem.

If you want automated help, you can use gcc's -Wstack-protector option, which will spot some overflows at runtime and abort the program.

valgrind is good for dynamic memory allocation bugs, but not for stack errors.