Source: samek-embedded

Stack

• Area of RAM that can grow or shrink from one end.
• Analogous to a stack of dishes: new data/dishes can only be added to the top, and data/dishes can only be taken away from the top.
• In ARM , the stack grows towards the lower addresses.
• Pointed to by the stack pointer .
• Initial values of the stack are random, therefore it is important, in function calls, to initialise variables correctly.
• Possible corruption of the stack: unintended modification of a previous return address, thus making the program unable to go back to the correct caller function.

Functions

• Stores the return address of the caller function.
• Holds local variables of the current function being executed.

Stack overflow

Stack grows out of bounds (out of the valid RAM allocation) / out of memory.