Unusual Stacksize Question

[Calin A. Culianu]

Ok, this question is kind of strange, and I am not even sure how to phrase
it clearly:

Are there any possible issues with processes that have ELS (Extremely
Large Stackspace [TM])?  [Ok, I made that term up..].  I have an ELS
process that I was tinkering with..  Purely for academic reasons, mind
you, I created huge arrays of doubles and managed to get the thing to
coredump.  I used setrlimit() to set the stacksize limit to infinity.  No
more core dumps.  But guess what?  Like half the time I now get a kernel
panic screen dump and the system immediately hangs...  I should think that
really, as long as you have enough memory, both real and imagined (I made
that term up too), nothing too bad can happen beyond a coredump maybe.

At any rate, I am suspicious of the motherboard and ram this system uses,
but I was just wondering if you guys knew of any issues in the kernel with
extremely large stack segments.. possibly in the context switch code or
somesuch (again, I should think not.. but I figured I should ask
anyway..).

The kernel is the stock redhat 7.1 kernel: 2.4.2-2

I apologize for the randomness of this question.. but at this point I am
trying to eliminate possibilities and if there were a known issue with
huge stack segments in userspace I would appreciate the info...

-Calin