[net.micro.mac] Stack Sniffer

tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (08/22/86)

Tech Support confirms that setting StkLowPt to zero will disable the stack
sniffer.  However, the usual caution that using undocumented features such
as this one may cause incompatibilities with future system versions was
tacked on.

It does work, but unfortunately other parts of the system assume that the
stack will be above the application heap.  For instance, the Memory Manager
ordinarily expands the application heap zone whenever a pointer or handle is
allocated and there is not enough room.  It will only do this if ApplLimit
is greater than HeapEnd, and if the stack pointer is *above* ApplLimit (by
at least MinStack).  The code that checks this may be found at 0x410884 in
the new ROMs.  It may be possible to get around this by setting MinStack to
a large negative value, but this might further confuse the Mac.  I haven't
tried yet.

In any case, I find this all to be rather annoying.  The extra code required
to deal with different memory configurations of processes would be trivial.
In a memory managed system, one would want the positions of stack and heap
to be logically independent.  Grumble grr....
-- 
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)

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