CONFIG_STACK_SENTINEL:

Store a magic value at the lowest addresses of a thread’s stack. Periodically check that this value is still present and kill the thread gracefully if it isn’t. This is currently checked in four places:

  1. Upon any context switch for the outgoing thread
  2. Any hardware interrupt that doesn’t context switch, the check is performed for the interrupted thread
  3. When a thread returns from its entry point
  4. When a thread calls k_yield() but doesn’t context switch

This feature doesn’t prevent corruption and the system may be in an unusable state. However, given the bizarre behavior associated with stack overflows, knowledge that this is happening is very useful.

This feature is intended for those systems which lack hardware support for stack overflow protection, or have insufficient system resources to use that hardware support.

Symbol:

STACK_SENTINEL
Type:

bool
Value:

“n”
User value:

(no user value)
Visibility:

“y”
Is choice item:

false
Is defined:

true
Is from env.:

false
Is special:

false
Prompts:
  • “Enable stack sentinel”
Default values:
  • n (value: “n”)
  • Condition: (none)
Selects:
Reverse (select-related) dependencies:
 

(no reverse dependencies)
Additional dependencies from enclosing menus and ifs:
 

(no additional dependencies)
Locations:
  • ../subsys/debug/Kconfig:26