activation-record

During which phase of building a binary is activation record defined ?

Is it during a pre-processing or compilation stage, say on gcc? Is it different on other compilers? ...

Activation Record Length

I get 6,4,3 for the first 3 questions respectively, but I don't know how to figure out the last one. However, the solution manual indicated 7,5,4,18 as the answers. int sum(int x[], int N) { int k = 0; int s = 0; while (k < N) { s = s + x[k]; k = k + 1; } return s; // the activation record for sum will be ____________ ...