I have implemented PARLANSE, a language under MS Windows that uses cactus stacks to implement parallel programs. The stack chunks are allocated on a per-function basis and are just the right size to handle local variables, expression temp pushes/pops, and calls to libraries (including stack space for the library routines to work in). Such stack frames can be as small as 32 bytes in practice and often are.
This all works great unless the code does something stupid and causes a hardware trap... at which point Windows appears to insist on pushing the entire x86 machine context "on the stack". This is some 500+ bytes if you include the FP/MMX/etc. registers, which it does. Naturally, a 500 byte push on a 32 byte stack smashes things it should not. (The hardware pushes a few words on a trap, but not the entire context).
[EDIT 11/27/2012: See this for measured details on the rediculous amount of stack Windows actually pushes]
Can I get Windows to store the exception context block someplace else (e.g., to a location specific to a thread)? Then the software could take the exception hit on the thread and process it without overflowing my small stack frames.
I don't think this is possible, but I thought I'd ask a much larger audience. Is there an OS standard call/interface that can cause this to happen?
It would be trivial to do in the OS, if I could con MS into letting my process optionally define a context storage location, "contextp", which is initialized to enable the current legacy behavior by default. Then replacing the interrrupt/trap vector codee:
hardwareint: push context
mov contextp, esp
... with ...
hardwareint: mov <somereg> contextp
test &