Re: Was this question too technical for this group? : Is the %ESP register special?
http://www.tux.org/lkml/
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/#s3-1
The LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) is a much better suited place,
however, be warned, the traffic is high. You do not have to be subscribed
to post, so you may even look for responses in one of the unofficial
archives (http://www.kernel.org/#mailinglist)
Additionally, a quick review of TLDP (The Linux Documentation Project)
shows some good information on Memory Management:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/tlk/mm/memory.html
The LKML has some code which I believes addresses some of your stack
pointer concerns:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0507.3/1769.html
Best of luck :)
-Matthew
On Sun, 4 Sep 2005, Hendrik Boom wrote:
Was this question too technical for this list?
If so, where do you recommend I ask it again?
-- hendrik
> Using assembler in debian on an intel platform.
>
> Is the %ESP register special in any way (except, of course,
> ist use in the POP and PUSH istructions and their friends.)
>
> Let me clarify.
>
> On VMS (old VAX OS), the convnetion was that any data on the stack
> above the stacp poibter was forfeit -- at any time tod OS could
> come in and clobber it, even *during* instruction execution.
> Firthermore, the value of the stack pointer clued in the OS as to whether
> it chould create new pages to handle a page-fault exception, thereby
> extending the stack.
>
> As a result, if you used the stack pointer for anything other than
> pointing to the top of the stack, even momentarily, you were in deep,
> deep trouble.
>
> Are there similar OS constraints imposed by the Linux kernel? How do
> pages get allocated to the stack, for example. Is the user's %ESP
> used in any way for this? Can I make any use of %ESP that I want?
> For example, can I allocate a lot of mini-stacks in garbage-collected
> storage to handle, say, a coroutine system, without interference?
> (And yes, it's a compressing garbage-collector. The stacks will
> move around every time garbage-collection occurs.)
>
> -- hendrik
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