This field is never big enough to warrant 16-bitness. 8-bit accesses enjoy shorted encoding on i386/x86_64 than 16-bit accesses:
add/remove: 0/0 grow/shrink: 0/2 up/down: 0/-10 (-10) function old new delta loopback_setup 169 164 -5 ether_setup 148 143 -5 Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobri...@gmail.com> --- include/linux/netdevice.h | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) --- a/include/linux/netdevice.h +++ b/include/linux/netdevice.h @@ -1715,7 +1715,7 @@ struct net_device { unsigned int max_mtu; unsigned short type; unsigned short hard_header_len; - unsigned short min_header_len; + unsigned char min_header_len; unsigned short needed_headroom; unsigned short needed_tailroom;