A Comparison of Scalable Multi-Threaded Stack Mechanisms. Moore-Oliva, J., Sekerinski, E., & Yao, S. Technical Report CAS-14-07-ES, McMaster University, April, 2014.
A Comparison of Scalable Multi-Threaded Stack Mechanisms [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   2 downloads  
In the commonly used multi-threaded memory layout where each thread has its ”worst case” stack memory exclusively reserved, a process may prematurely run out of memory, even if there is unused address space elsewhere. This problem is exacerbated as the number of threads in a process increases since there is less stack space available per thread. In this paper, stack mechanisms that attempt to alleviate this problem are reviewed, and a new stack mechanism is put forward that utilizes the MMU to detect stack overflow. An experimental compiler is used to implement promising stack mechanisms and a suite of benchmarks is used to compare their performance and scalability under varying usage profiles.

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