[llvm-dev] Guarantees on stack overflow

[Peter Lammich via llvm-dev]

Hi list,

I'm wondering what guarantees I get if my program runs into a stack
overflow. 

Background: I'm compiling security critical software via LLVM-IR. I can
guarantee (by program analysis, theorem proving, etc) that I have no
buffer overflows, and that the program is terminated in a controlled
way if it runs out of heap memory (calloc from libc has a clearly
defined semantics of returning NULL, or, in practice, the process may
be killed by the OS's OOM killer).

But what's about the stack? I cannot even estimate how much stack I
need, as this depends on LLVM optimization and backend passes. 
>From testing on a Linux x86-64 system, my experience is that I get a
SIGSEGV in these cases. But is this guaranteed? Or might it happen that
a stack overflow silently overwrites some memory and causes chaos and
security issues? 

Thanks in advance for any help or links to documentation on this issue,
  Peter