On Friday 15 June 2007, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> You're relying on compat_[us]64 being only used in structures which are
> already packed. If someone uses them in a non-packed struct, they won't
> decrease the alignment. I think it would be more effective to specify
> it as:
>
> __attribute__((aligned(4), packed))
That's what I thought as well at first, since this is how the gcc
documentation seems to describe it. However, recent version of gcc
complain about this:
gcc-4.1 -Wall -O2 test.c -c
test.c:1: warning: 'packed' attribute ignored
I have tested versions 2.95, 3.3 and 4.1, an they all ignore do the
right thing when you do not specify the packed attribute.
> The other problem is that if someone defines a struct like this:
>
> struct foo {
> short bar;
> compat_s64 baz;
> } __attribute__((packed))
>
> it'll have different definitions on x86 and ia64.
>
> So I think we should be aiming for the ((aligned, packed)) definition and
> remove the __attribute__((packed)) from the struct definitions. What do
> you think?
There should never be an __attribute__((packed)) to solve this alignment
problem, neither in the definition of compat_s64 nor in the definition of
a data structure using it.
We might ask the gcc developers to clarify the documentation, which as of 4.1
states:
The `aligned' attribute can only increase the alignment; but you
can decrease it by specifying `packed' as well. See below.
My understanding is that this only applies to statically allocated variables,
but not to automatic stack variables and to usage of the type inside of
a data structure.
Arnd <><
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