So I understand what a stack overflow is, when memory collides (and the title of this website) but what I do not understand is why new entries to the stack are in a decremental memory address. Why are they not in a random memory address, would it not make more sense so that memory collision is not an issue? I am guessing there is some sort of optimizing reason behind that?
** EDIT **
What I did not realize is a stack is given x amount of address space. Makes sense now but brings me to a follow-up question. Can I explicitly state how much memory I want to allocate to a stack?
"Memory collides" would better suit the term of "buffer overflow", where you write outside of the predestined space, but where it is likely to be within a different allocated memory block.
A stack overflow is not about writing outside of one's memory allocation into another memory allocation. It's just about writing outside of one's stack memory allocation. Most likely outside of the stack there's a guard memory page, that is not allocated for anything and which causes a fault on a read or write attempt.
And assigning a random address for each value pushed on the stack makes it hard to find data on the stack (and it's not a stack anymore). When the compiler or programmer knows that subsequent elements occupy subsequent addresses, then it's easy to compute those addresses just from the base pointer of the stack frame.
The answer to this question is probably complex, but basically stack operations are considered to be very primitive functions that the processor does as part of normal execution of code. (Saving return addresses and other stuff.)
So where do you put the memory management code? Where do you track the allocated addresses or add code to allocate new addresses? There really isn't anywhere to do this as these are basic operations performed by the processor itself.
Similar to the memory that holds the code itself, the stack is assumed to be setup before the code runs (and pointed to by the stack register). There really isn't any place to add complex memory management to stack memory. And so, yes, if not enough memory was provided, the stack will overflow.
Stack overflow is when you have used up all available stack space. The space available for the stack is, in most cases just an arbitrary limit chosen by the system designers. It is possible to alter this, but on modern systems, it's not really an issue - code that needs several megabytes of stack, unless the system is REALLY huge, is probably not correctly designed.
The stack grows towards zero from "custom" - it has to go in a defined direction or it would be very hard to follow what is going on, and lower adddress is just as good as higher address. It used to be that stack and heap grew towards each other, which would allow code that uses a lot of stack and not so much heap to work in the same amount of memory as something that uses a smaller amount of stack and a larger amount of heap. But these days, there is typically enough memory (space) that the heap can be defined to be somewhere completely separate from the stack. Instead the stack overflow is detected by having a region of "reserved" memory just at the top of the stack that is not usable - so the OS gets a "trap" for using memory that isn't available, and the application can be killed.
Related
Is there a way to programmatically change the stack size in Contiki?
I know on Linux systems I'm able to call:
ulimit -s SIZE
But I'm currently using Contiki as a flashed binary, and don't really have access to a traditional terminal. I've tried executing the command from C using system() and popen() calls to no avail.
Perhaps there's a CFLAG or LDFLAG I can leverage? Or modifying something in the makefile?
FYI I'm flashing the binary to a Texas Instruments cc2650, which has a 32 bit processor.
CC2650 does not have a MPU (Memory Protection Unit), which implies that no one checks for the boundaries of the stack region during runtime, which in turn implies that there is no way to "reserve" stack in the same sense that stack memory is reserved on Linux.
Essentially, if you keep allocating new things on stack, the stack will keep to grow even after it reaches other memory regions - usually the .data region, which contains dynamically allocated memory, if any, and static/global variables. The growth of stack will corrupt the memory in those other regions in a way that you might even fail to notice, leading to hard-to-find bugs.
There are a couple of things to do. One is to reserve bigger stack memory during compile time. This will not limit the stack region, but will limit the extent of the data region. To do that, change the CC2650 linker script in cpu/cc26xx-cc13xx/cc26xx.ld:
_Min_Stack_Size = 0x100; /* 256 bytes by default for the stack */
The other thing is to use Contiki-NG recent revisions, which have built-in stackoverflow checks. There is still no way to change the stack region size during runtime, but you will get an error if stack overflow happens.
I try to understand the basics of concurrent programming in Go. Almost all articles use the term "address space", for example: "All goroutines share the same address space". What does it mean?
I've tried to understand the following topics from wiki, but it wasn't successful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_segmentation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_(computer_memory)
...
However at the moment it's difficult to understand for me, because my knowledges in areas like memory management and concurrent programming are really poor. There are many unknown words like segments, pages, relative/absolute addresses, VAS etc.
Could anybody explain to me the basics of the problem? May be there are some useful articles, that I can't find.
Golang spec:
A "go" statement starts the execution of a function call as an independent concurrent thread of control, or goroutine, within the same address space.
Could anybody explain to me the basics of the problem?
"Address space" is a generic term which can apply to many contexts:
Address spaces are created by combining enough uniquely identified qualifiers to make an address unambiguous (within a particular address space)
Dave Cheney's presentation "Five things that make Go fast" illustrates the main issue addressed by having goroutine within the same process address space: stack management.
Dave's qualifies the "address space", speaking first of thread:
Because a process switch can occur at any point in a process’ execution, the operating system needs to store the contents of all of these registers because it does not know which are currently in use.
This lead to the development of threads, which are conceptually the same as processes, but share the same memory space.
(so this is about memory)
Then Dave illustrates the stack within a process address space (the addresses managed by a process):
Traditionally inside the address space of a process,
the heap is at the bottom of memory, just above the program (text) and grows upwards.
The stack is located at the top of the virtual address space, and grows downwards.
See also "What and where are the stack and heap?".
The issue:
Because the heap and stack overwriting each other would be catastrophic, the operating system usually arranges to place an area of unwritable memory between the stack and the heap to ensure that if they did collide, the program will abort.
With threads, that can lead to restrict the heap size of a process:
as the number of threads in your program increases, the amount of available address space is reduced.
goroutine uses a different approach, while still sharing the same process address space:
what about the stack requirements of those goroutines ?
Instead of using guard pages, the Go compiler inserts a check as part of every function call to check if there is sufficient stack for the function to run. If there is not, the runtime can allocate more stack space.
Because of this check, a goroutines initial stack can be made much smaller, which in turn permits Go programmers to treat goroutines as cheap resources.
Go 1.3 introduces a new way of managing those stacks:
Instead of adding and removing additional stack segments, if the stack of a goroutine is too small, a new, larger, stack will be allocated.
The old stack’s contents are copied to the new stack, then the goroutine continues with its new larger stack.
After the first call to H the stack will be large enough that the check for available stack space will always succeed.
When you application runs on the RAM, addresses in RAM are allocated to your application by the memory manager. This is refered to as address space.
Concept:
the processor (CPU) executes instructions in a Fetch-Decode-Execute
cycle. It executes instructions in an applicaiton by fetching it to
the RAM (Random Acces Memory). This is done because it is very
in-efficient to get it all the way from disk. Some-one needs to keep
track of memory usage, so the operating system implements a memory
manager. Your appication, consists of some program, in your case this
is written in Go programming language. When you execute your script,
the OS executes the instructions in the above mentioned fashion.
Reading your post i can empathize. The terms you mentioned will become familiar to you as program more and more.
I first encountered these terms from the operating systems book, a.k.a the dinosaur book.
Hope this helps you.
On computer memory, say IA32, what is the range of stack in general? I know an address like 0xffff1234 is probably on the stack. Is it possible for the stack to grow to 0x0800abcd, for example? How about the heap? I know the heap address is always lower than the stack address, but what is normally its range? Also what is the area below heap?
The stack - The memory the program uses to actually run the program. This contains local variables, call-back data (for example when you call a function, the stack stores the state and place you were in the code before you entered the new function), and some other little things of that nature. You usually don't control the stack directly, the variables and data are destroyed, created when you move in and out function scopes.
The heap - The "dynamic" memory of the program. Each time you create a new object or variable dynamically, it is stored on the heap. This memory is controlled by the programmer directly, you are supposed to take care of the creation AND deletion of the objects there.
Thanks a lot!
Stack:
You can define the size of your stack in linking time.
As I know, windows app default stack size is 2MB.
You can change the size of stack in your project setting. But when App is built, stack size is fixed.
And OS would set guard page for stack overflow. If any operation try to access the guard page would trigger EXCEPTION.
Heap:
Default heap size i guess also can be changed in project settings.
Because in your App, you can create your own heap, or use CRT heap, Win32 heap. So there should be lots of heaps.
When your try to allocate memory, Heap Manager based on algorithm to allocate memory. If there's not enough memory, Heap Manager would apply for memory from Virtual Memory Manager. Until there's not enough memory in User Address Space, throw exception: Out of Memory.
There's several definitions: HeapNode, HeapSegment, LFH, LEA, BEA.
And you can use Windbg: !heap -s, !heap -a, these commands to check the structure of Windows Heap.
Why do assembly languages use both a stack and a heap? They seem redundant.
They're not redundant. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses: A stack is faster if used right, because memory allocation is trivial (push / pop). The downside is that you can only add and remove items at the top (hence the name, stack). Also, total stack space is limited, and when you run out, you have a... well, stack overflow. The heap, by contrast, allows random allocation and deallocation, and you can store large amounts of data there, but the downside is that allocation carries more overhead - for each allocated block of memory, a suitable free portion must be found, and in the long run, fragmentation of the free space needs to be avoided, and the system must track where the free blocks are.
You use the stack to pass around small short-lived values, e.g. local counter variables, function arguments, return values, etc.; these lend themselves to push/pop allocation style. For larger or long-lived data structures, you use the heap.
You could certainly construct a computing system that utilised either one of them as its only memory model. However, they both have rather different properties each with its own good and bad points. Most systems utilise both so as to get the benefits from each of them.
Stacks
A stack can be thought of as a pile of plates, you write a value on a plate and put it on the top of the stack this is called a push operation and stores a value on the stack. You can obviously also remove the top plate from the stack this is called a pop operation. But new allocations must always be at the top of the stack.
The stack tend to be used for local variables and passing values between functions. Generally stacks have the following awesome properties:
Requires only a handful of pointers to manage
Very easy to implement in hardware, most processors have built in hardware support for a stack making it even faster.
Very quick to allocate memory
The problem with the stack comes from the fact items can only be added/removed from the top of the stack. Now this makes great sense when traversing up and down through function calls: pop functions inputs from the stack, allocate space for local variables on the stack, run function, clear local variables from the top of the stack and push the return value onto the stack. If on the other hand I want to allocate some memory and say pass it to another thread or in general free it far away from where it was allocated all of a sudden I have a problem, the stack is not in the correct position when I want to free the memory.
You could say the stack facilitates fast sequential memory allocation.
Heap
Now the heap is different each allocation is generally tracked separately. This causes a lot of overhead for allocations and deallocations, but each one can be handled independently of other memory allocations, well until you run out of memory.
There are numerous algorithms for accomplishing this and it is probably a bit unwise to twitter on about them here but here is a link that talks about a few good simple heap allocation algorithms: Alternatives to malloc and new
So the heap facilitates random memory allocation but this comes with a runtime penalty, however that penalty is often small that what would be incurred if you had to handle the situation using just the stack.
It is about the memory handling and managing.
There are different type of registers of x86 architectures.
There are possibilities of hardware supported memory management on x86 architecture and so on.
Stack is used by instruction pointer, Heap is for data segment in some applications.
To read more I advice you read the following links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_segment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_memory_segmentation
"A memory model allows a compiler to perform many important
optimizations" - Wikipedia
Is infinite recursion the only case or can it happen for other reasons?
Doesn't the stack size grow as needed same as heap?
Sorry if this question has been asked before, would appreciate links to them if that is the case.
I can't speak for all platforms, but as it happens, I've just spent some time working with Windows .exe files (I mean, actually studying the binary format of them - I know in a sense all of us here work with executable files ;) ). I'm betting that most other platforms have similar capabilities, but I'm not immediate familiar with them.
Part of the file format itself includes two values relevant to the current discussion:
typedef struct _IMAGE_OPTIONAL_HEADER {
...
DWORD SizeOfStackReserve;
DWORD SizeOfStackCommit;
...
} IMAGE_OPTIONAL_HEADER32, *PIMAGE_OPTIONAL_HEADER32;
From MSDN:
SizeOfStackReserve
The number of bytes to reserve for the
stack. Only the memory specified by
the SizeOfStackCommit member is
committed at load time; the rest is
made available one page at a time
until this reserve size is reached.
SizeOfStackCommit
The number of bytes to commit for the
stack.
In other words, the linker specifies a maximum size for the program's stack. If you hit the maximum size, you overflow - no matter how you hit the maximum size. You could write a simple program to do it in one line of code just by allocating a single stack variable (say, an array) that's bigger than the maximum stack size. Or you could do it via infinite (or finite, but very deep) recursion, or just by allocating too many stack variables.
The Microsoft linker sets this value to 1MB by default on X86 platforms (4MB on Itanium systems). This seems small on the face of it, for a modern system. However, more modern versions of Windows interpret these values slightly differently. Instead of completely limiting the stack, it limits the physical memory the stack will use. If your stack grows beyond this, virtual memory will get involved, so you should still be good... assuming you have enough virtual memory.
Remember, it is possible to run out of memory, even on modern systems with huge amounts of RAM and plenty of virtual memory on disk. You just need to allocate really big amounts of data.
So, long story short: is it possible to overflow the stack without infinite recursion? Definitely. Is it likely? Not really, unless you're allocating really huge objects.
The stack overflows when the stack pointer is pushed out of the memory block the operating system has allocated for the stack. Some operating systems will resize the stack as it grows (IIRC Linux does this) while in others the stack size is fixed at the start of the process or thread (IIRC Windows does this).
Possible reasons for overflowing the stack:
An unbounded number of stack frames (e.g. from unbounded recursion)
Attempting to allocate large blocks from the stack
Buffer overflows for buffers allocated on the stack
There are probably other reasons as well that I can't think of off the top of my head.
This question doesn't specify which stack is "the" stack. So, here are a few answers:
Call Stack
The call stack gets overflowed whenever the number of calls on the stack overruns the amount of memory it has. The most common way is infinite recursion, but it's quite possible to have recursion that's excessive but not infinite. For example, computing the Ackermann function naively will tax any computer.
Languages
Stack-based languages
Some languages, like Postscript and Forth, and some virtual machines, like the Java virtual machine, are stack-based. In these languages, it may be possible to make expressions so complex that they overflow the stack.
Context-free languages
Context-free languages are often implemented using a stack. If the strings for the code of these languages gets too complex, it's possible to overflow the stack.
On a laptop or desktop machine it may be unusual to overflow the stack without infinite (or very deeply nested) recursion when running from the main thread... however, stack overflows are not uncommon for:
Threaded code in which the thread has been allotted a small, fixed-sized stack.
Signal handling code in which the signal handling context has a small, fixed-sized stack.
Code executing on embedded devices, where memory is generally scarce.
As an example, if you register a signal handler using sigaction, if the signal handler does any complex (i.e. deeply nested operations) it is very easy to get a stack overflow on a number of operating systems, since signal handlers are usually allotted a small, fixed-sized stack. Similarly, if you spawn a thread with pthread_create, but you specify a small stacksize with pthread_attr_setstacksize, then it is very easy to attain a stack overflow. On very memory-limited devices such wireless sensors, it is an art to avoid stack overflows.
My day job involves a lot of work with LotusScript in Lotus Notes, which has fixed stack limits for various scopes. E.g. most variables in a procedure/function must fit in a 32kB stack, except that the content of class variables is stored on the heap.
If fixed-size variables exceed the stack size, code won't compile.
Run-time stack overflows can occur with recursion. This is easy to achieve in LotusScript as it limits recursion of any single function to a 32kB stack. I gave up on using a recursive QuickSort years ago because of this.
If your program exceeds its alloted stack space without any infinite recursion going on, then you're doing something wrong.
Though it can happen if you leave off some asterisks and try to pass some huge buffers by value.
The memory allocated for the stack does generally grow as needed within reasonable boundaries - I'm not sure what the upper limit is on various systems.