On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 8:50 PM, Hartmut Kaiser <hartmut.kaiser@gmail.com> wrote:
Why is the minimally possible stack size in Boost.Context on Windows set to be 64k? This seems to be way too high for applications where only a minimal amount of stack is required. I assume, that since Boost.Context allocates the stack using VirtualAlloc the minimum possible value should be equal to the page size (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366887(v=vs. 85).as px).
A thread's minimum stack size is Windows' allocation granularity, which is not the size of a single page. Currently this is 64KB. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms686774.aspx
VirtualAlloc also rounds up allocations to this granularity. If you request 4KB, you'll actually waste a lot of space and get 64KB.
The allocation granularity can be determined using GetSystemInfo().
This is definitely true for the stack allocated by CreateThread, CreateFiber et.al. However there is no limitation in actually using a smaller stack in Boost.Context as it allocates the stack outside of CreateThread or CreateFiber, directly using VirtalAlloc.
The docs of VirtualAlloc specify that the minimal (enforced) allocation size there is 4k - i.e. the page size (see the link I provided above).
For VirtualAlloc, reserves are allocation granularity based and commits are page based. For Context to use VirtualAlloc and give you 4KB without wasting 60KB, it'd have to build its own allocator and might as well just use malloc/new. -- Cory Nelson http://int64.org