Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758550Ab1FPSQb (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:16:31 -0400 Received: from h1446028.stratoserver.net ([85.214.92.142]:59722 "EHLO mail.ahsoftware.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757936Ab1FPSQ1 (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:16:27 -0400 Message-ID: <4DFA4864.2030900@ahsoftware.de> Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:16:04 +0200 From: Alexander Holler User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110428 Fedora/3.1.10-1.fc13 Lightning/1.0b3pre Thunderbird/3.1.10 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Alan Stern CC: gregkh@suse.de, Rabin Vincent , linux-usb@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, Arnd Bergmann Subject: Re: [PATCH] USB: ehci: use packed,aligned(4) instead of removing the packed attribute References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1500 Lines: 40 Am 16.06.2011 19:09, schrieb Alan Stern: > On Thu, 16 Jun 2011, Alexander Holler wrote: > >> In commit 139540170d9d9b7ead3caaf540f161756b356d56 the attribute >> packed is removed from the structs which are used to access the EHCI-registers. >> >> This is done to circumvent a problem with gcc 4.6, which might access members of >> packed structs on a byte by byte basis. But using packed, aligned(4) fixes that >> too and is imho the better solution. Otherwise (without packed) the compiler would be free >> to choose whatever alignment he thinks fits best, which might be e.g. 8-byte on 64-bit machines. > > Is that really true? I thought the compiler was not allowed to insert > padding if the natural alignment of the data types didn't require any. > > Alan Stern I wasn't sure and have searched c99 before posting the patch but I haven't found something which states what you are suggesting. Maybe I was too stupid to find it, I've searched for the words "alignment" and "padding". The only statement I've found was "There may be unnamed padding within a structure object, but not at its beginning." in 6.7.2.1 13 and "There may be unnamed padding at the end of a structure or union." in 6.7.2.1. 15 in my copy of c99. Regards, Alexander -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/