RE: [avr-gcc-list] Stack usage under heavy inlining

[Weddington, Eric]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> address@hidden 
> [mailto:address@hidden
> org] On Behalf Of Tristan Gingold
> Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 9:16 AM
> To: Paulo Marques
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [avr-gcc-list] Stack usage under heavy inlining
> 
> 
> On Sep 8, 2008, at 1:43 PM, Paulo Marques wrote:
> 
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Yesterday I was tracking down a problem in a personal project of  
> > mine whose symptoms looked like a stack overflow.
> >
> > As it turned out, it was the same problem with gcc that I had  
> > already read about on LKML: when gcc inlines a function it  
> > increases the stack usage of the caller by almost all the stack  
> > usage of the callee.
> 
> At AdaCore we have a tool (gnatstack) that compute the stack 
> usage of  
> a program.  We have submitted (a long
> time ago) patches to gcc for this tool.  IIRC they were never  
> commented nor approved - lack of interests.

That's a pity. But was this tool geared towards Ada only?

There is also "stacktool" written by Dr. John Regehr (CCed) that is for AVR 
programs, but mainly geared towards TinyOS/AVR based applications. When this 
first came out, I initially had problems getting it to work on a 
significantly-sized real-world program. In the end, I never got the tool to 
work.

John and I have had a number of conversations since then about the general 
problem of doing static analysis on stack usage, and it is a difficult problem 
to solve.

Eric Weddington