WinCE6 stack leak issue

Question

Hi,
I am trying to track down an memory leak that I have been working on for the past few weeks.  The leak seems to be coming from the stack.  We are creating a thread of 1MB stack, but the system is only allocating 64k.  My gut feeling is anything
beyond this 64k is being leaked.
After the thread is created, I am getting the context ( reset) - and it is only 64k out beyond the mem base.  It should be 1MB.  Does anyone know why this is the case?  If our stack usage goes beyond the 64k range, how can the memory be recovered
(freed)?
This is a kernel driver creating kernel threads.  The driver is loaded by the system and threads are created and exited on "init" and "deinit" IOCTL (DeviceIOControl) calls, respectively.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi Paul,
Thank you so much for the reply.  Yes, the real goal is to eliminate the leak.  Leaks are on the order of 150k to 200k, but only occur when the threads are exited - we do a mem snaps shot from test to test and do a diff between the 2 physical mem
sizes.  I have concluded the leak is coming from the stack by allocating a large char array (within a function so it's not static) in our library that is called into from the running thread - we see it grow the larger I make the array.
Here is my create thread.
nStackSize = 1024 * 1024;
m_hMyThread = CreateThread(NULL,nStackSize,(LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE)MyThreadShell,(LPVOID)this,CREATE_SUSPENDED | STACK_SIZE_PARAM_IS_A_RESERVATION,NULL);
After this, we get the "reset context" and commit it all to RAM so we don't run into demand paging issues.  What's strange is the context is at 64k (not 1MB as I would have expected).  My suspicion is if we use more than that 64k, we
lose whatever goes beyond that.  Our threading design typically runs in Application space for CE5/WinMobile - but relies on LoadDriver.  Since this is  now a kernel only call in CE6, we made a kernel driver.
We are tracking our own Heap and cleaning it up on exit, so I don't suspect this is leaking.  Our library uses a lot of stack space and is why we allocate so much.
Some other points:  This same design ("driver" model) works fine in CE5/Windows Mobile.
Thanks!
BTW:  Here is some data... We are creating 2 threads, first size is 1MB and second is default (linker settings - which is 64k).
Windows Mobile:
AllocationBase=0x2a1a0000, m_pMyContext->Sp=0x2a29fee0
AllocationBase=0x2a2a0000, m_pMyContext->Sp=0x2a33fee0
Thread1 “my context” is 1MB out from AllocationBase.
Thread2 “my context” is 64KB out from AllocationBase.
WinCE6:
AllocationBase=0xd6d00000, m_pMyContext->Sp=0xd6d0fe90
AllocationBase=0xd60b0000, m_pMyContext->Sp=0xd60bfe90
Thread1 “my context” is 64KB out from AllocationBase. <- BAD
Thread2 “my context” is 64KB out from AllocationBase.