just needed to ask right person john.philip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes: ] - is use of pointer to struct fields (@ [1]) non-portable? yes. because of diff alignment restrictions on diff CPUs for ways to find such code, or even do see-no-evil & have linux kernel fix them at run time, see http://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiFixes & http://lecs.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/index.php/XScale_alignment --