C stack frame > 64K

John Gilmore gnu at sun.uucp
Tue Dec 4 16:25:40 AEST 1984


> I have recently had some practical experience with this issue.  On the
> Gould UTX-32 system (and I believe on IBM 370s too), the architecture
> rather strongly encouraged the C/UNIX implementors to use a relatively
> small chunk of address space for the run-time stack...
>            ...I imagine someone has written code that needs more, but
> they have already severely limited their target machine choices.

The Sun C compiler used to have this restriction.  We fixed it.  It was easy
(on the 68000).  Hey, all you people who "severely limited their target
machine choices" -- your code will run fine on Suns!

It's hard to believe a serious IBM mainframe Unix port would limit
stack size to 64K out of a 16MB (larger on newer models) linear address
space.  Especially since "stacks" on a 370 are a software abstraction --
there is no hardware support for them.



More information about the Comp.lang.c mailing list