Program Break

Tags

comp-arch

Is the first location after the end of the a processes uninitialised data-segment; essentially it determines the boundary for the heap.

You can instead the program break and effectively expand the size of the heap through the sbrk system-call. Calling sbrk(0) is a common way to find where the heap currently ends but is rarely used in user-facing code (which instead relies on memory allocators like malloc that call sbrk when required).