That's interesting. So if a thread briefly uses 1M stack, and relinquishes most of it, then the kernel still keeps that unused 1M memory in the page table?
I expected the linux kernel to be more intelligent, but maybe there's a reason it behaves like that?
Under pressure, it will eventually page the memory back out, but generally you never want to get your machine into a state where paging happens. Aside from that, there is no mechanism that allows the kernel to know the memory is no longer used unless you explicitly tell it, e.g. via madvise(2).
Though I can't think of a sane way to call madvise(2) involving a thread stack
I expected the linux kernel to be more intelligent, but maybe there's a reason it behaves like that?