[Please include me in CCs - I am not subscribed to the list.]
Hi guys, I am a graduate student at University of Washington, building a tool automatically discover portability bugs in system-level code written in C. My definition of "portability" is at the data layout level, accounting for differences in alignment, padding, and generally layout policies on various platforms. E.g., one might perform a pointer cast that only works as intended when doubles are 4-byte aligned, which is the case with gcc/ia-32 (default options) but not with gcc/sparc (due to sparc's limited support for accessing doubles on non-8-byte boundaries). I am looking for advice on how/where to look for these kinds of bugs in the kernel and related software. This (dated) document (http://netwinder.osuosl.org/users/b/brianbr/public_html/alignment.html ) describes exactly these sorts of issues in the context of Linux/ARM and mentions things like the kernel, binutils, cpio, X11, Orbit, as sources of these sorts of bugs. I am having a bit of a hard time locating change logs and otherwise related information on where these bugs occurred, patches that addressed them, etc. Any pointers or discussion whatsoever about known/fixed bugs, and also any hunches on where these sorts of portability bugs might lay dormant, would be much appreciated. I am committed to contributing back anything I find in my research - in the form of patches or bug reports. Thank you! -Marius - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
