Is it possible to predict a stack overflow in C on Linux?

Question

There are certain conditions that can cause stack overflows on an x86 Linux system:

• struct my_big_object[HUGE_NUMBER] on the stack. Walking throu

Answer 1

Not sure if this applies on Linux, but on Windows it's possible to run into access violations with large stack allocations even if they succeed!

This is because by default, Windows' VMM only actually marks the top few (not sure how many exactly) 4096-byte pages of stack RAM as pageable (i.e. backed by the pagefile), since it believes that stack accesses will generally march downwards from the top; as accesses get closer and closer to the current "boundary", lower and lower pages are marked as pageable. But this means that an early memory read/write far below the top of the stack will trigger an access violation as that memory is not actually allocated yet!