On Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:38:32 +0100 Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Saturday 31 January 2009, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:29:11 +0530 Ankit Jain <me@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > +struct space_resv {
> > > + __s16 l_type;
> > > + __s16 l_whence;
> > > + __s64 l_start;
> > > + __s64 l_len; /* len == 0 means until end of file */
> > > + __s32 l_sysid;
> > > + __u32 l_pid;
> > > + __s32 l_pad[4]; /* reserve area */
> > > +};
> > > +
> > > +#define F_IOC_RESVSP _IOW('X', 40, struct space_resv)
> > > +#define F_IOC_RESVSP64 _IOW('X', 42, struct space_resv)
> >
> > Are we sure that the aligment of l_start will be reliably the same
> > across all compilers and versions thereof for all time?
>
> On x86, the alignment differs between 32 and 64 bit, otherwise it's ok.
Is this written in a standard somewhere? Is it guaranteed?
If some (perhaps non-gcc) compiler were to lay this out differently
(perhaps with suitable command-line options) then that's liveable
with - as long as the kernel never changes the layout. Of course
it would be better to avoid this if poss.
The other potential issue with a structure like this is that there's a
risk that it will lead us to copy four bytes of uninitialised kernel
memory out to userspace.
IOW, it seems a generally bad idea to rely upon compiler-added padding
for this sort of thing.
> XFS handles the conversion for compat_ioctl in
> fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_ioctl32.c. If this becomes a generic file ioctl,
> the conversion code should be moved to fs/compat_ioctl.c.
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