Andrew S. Tanenbaum (OS) Edition 4 Exercise 2 Question 4 (Page No. 174)

Question

When an interrupt or a system call transfers control to the operating system, a kernel stack area separate from the stack of the interrupted process is generally used. Why?

Answer 1

Kernel stack area separate from the stack of the interrupted process because:

• To protect the operating system from crashing because of the poorly written user program.
• To protect from the malicious user who may be able to use the stack data left by the kernel in the user program's memory space while returning from a system call.