On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 05:27:20PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote: > No, icc surely supports attribute(packed). My point is that we shouldn't > rely upon the gcc info file for this, because other compilers can (or > could) be used to build the kernel. > > So it would be safer if the C spec said (or could be interpreted to say) > "members of packed structures are always copied bytewise". So then we > can be reasonably confident that this change won't break the use of > those compilers. > > But then, I don't even know if any C standard says anything about packing. Memory layout and alignment of structures and members are implementation defined according to the C standard; the standard provides no means to influence these. So it takes a compiler extension such as gcc's __attribute__(). > Ho hum. Why are we talking about this, anyway? Does the patch make the > code faster? Or just nicer? Smaller binary and from looking at the disassembly a tad faster also. Ralf
