Re: [PATCH v2] certs: specify byte alignment

[Giuliano Procida]

Hi.

On Thu, 6 Aug 2026 at 14:51, Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2025-09-23 at 10:08 +0100, Will Deacon wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 09:13:42AM +0100, Giuliano Procida wrote:
> > > The alignments specified in system_certificates.S and
> > > revocation_certificates.S are intended to be byte quantities.
> > >
> > > However, the .align macro is architecture dependent and on arm64 it
> > > behaves as .p2align. So use the .balign macro to avoid unnecessary
> > > padding due to over-alignment.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Giuliano Procida <gprocida@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > ---
> > >  certs/revocation_certificates.S | 4 ++--
> > >  certs/system_certificates.S     | 8 ++++----
> > >  2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
> >
> > Acked-by: Will Deacon <will@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > Will
>
> Hi,
>
> It seems this patch somehow got lost?
>
> Kexy found MIPS is specifically affected by the .align directive: on
> MIPS it not only behaves as p2align and introduces a lot of extra
> padding, but also moved before the __revocation_list_end label in the
> case of
>
> __revocation_list_end:
>
>     .align 8
>
> in revocation_certificates.S.  It seems the GNU assembler moves the
> .align earlier to mimic the IRIX assembler behavior described at page
> 110 of https://irix7.com/techpubs/007-2418-006.pdf:
>
>
>     Labels immediately preceding an automatic or explicit
>     alignment are also realigned. For example, foo:
>     .align 3; .word 0 is the same as .align 3;
>     foo: .word 0.
>
> Kexy's AI proposed the same fix as this patch.  So maybe we should apply
> it now?

That seems like a good idea. A colleague raised it again this week.
We were considering just applying it to ACK and forgetting about upstream.
I'm glad there's other interest though.

Could you raise this with the relevant maintainer?

> --
> Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks,
Giuliano.