The Linux Programming Interface

33THREADS: FURTHER DETAILS

This chapter provides further details on various aspects of POSIX threads. We discuss the interaction of threads with aspects of the traditional UNIX API—in particular, signals and the process control primitives (fork(), exec(), and _exit()). We also provide an overview of the two POSIX threads implementations available on Linux—LinuxThreads and NPTL—and note where each of these implementations deviates from the SUSv3 specification of Pthreads.

33.1 Thread Stacks

Each thread has its own stack whose size is fixed when the thread is created. On Linux/x86-32, for all threads other than the main thread, the default size of the per-thread stack is 2 MB. (On some 64-bit architectures, the default size is higher; for example, ...