Re: [PATCH v2] certs: specify byte alignment
From: Xi Ruoyao
Date: Sat Aug 08 2026 - 14:50:19 EST
On Thu, 2026-08-06 at 15:32 +0100, Giuliano Procida wrote:
> 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?
Hmm, get_maintainers.pl shows David Howells and David Woodhouse are the
relevant maintainers and they are already CC'ed. Or is the
get_maintainers.pl output inaccurate?
--
Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xxxxxxxxxxx>