On Friday 15 June 2007, Andi Kleen wrote:
>
> On Friday 15 June 2007 11:31:37 Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > One common problem with 32 bit system call and ioctl emulation
> > is the different alignment rules between i386 and 64 bit machines.
> > A number of drivers work around this by marking the compat
> > structures as 'attribute((packed))', which is not the right
> > solution because it breaks all the non-x86 architectures that
> > want to use the same compat code.
>
> Why does it break them? It should just make them a little slower.
>
> The network code requires unaligned accesses to work
> anyways so if your architecture doesn't support them it is already
> remotely crashable.
>
It doesn't break in all cases, but quite often, you have
something like:
struct foo {
__u32 a;
__u64 b;
};
If you define a
struct compat_foo {
__u32 a;
__u64 b;
} __attribute__((packed));
That is broken on all non-x86 architectures, because it removes the
padding that is inserted on the respective 32 bit platforms, while
struct compat_foo {
__u32 a;
compat_u64 b;
};
Is a correct definition on all architectures. It also produces
somewhat better code if the architecture does not support unaligned
data access, but that is just an unintended side-effect.
Arnd <><
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