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Introduction to Stack

Explore the fundamental concepts of stack operations within memory management for x64 architecture. Learn how the stack grows and shrinks through push and pop instructions, understand the role of the %RSP register in pointing to the stack top, and see how stacks are crucial for storing return addresses, function parameters, and local variables. This lesson helps you grasp how stacks support function calls and memory handling during debugging with GDB.

Stack

A stack is a simple computational device with two operations:

  • push
  • pop

These operations allow us to pile up data to remember it in LIFO (last in first out) manner, and quickly retrieve the last piled data item as shown below:

Stack implementation in memory

The CPU register %RSP (Stack Pointer) points to the ...