Segfault on stack overflow

Question

Why does the linux kernel generate a segfault on stack overflow? This can make debugging very awkward when alloca in c or fortran creation of temporary arrays overflows. Sur

Answer 1

Some of the comments are helpful, but the problem is not of memory allocation errors. That is there is no mistake in the code. It's quite a nuisance in fortran where the runtime allocates temporary values on the stack. Thus a command such as write(fp)x,y,z can trigger are segfault with no warning. The technical support for the intel Fortran compiler say that there is no way that the runtime library can print a more helpful message. However if Miguel is right than this should be possible as he suggests. So thanks a lot. The remaining question then is how do I firstly find the address of the seg fault and the figure out if it came from a stack overflow or some other problem.

For others who find this problem there is a compiler flag which puts temporary varibles above a certain size on the heap.