Re: [PATCH] Introduce compat_u64 and compat_s64 types

[Andi Kleen]

On Friday 15 June 2007 11:31:37 Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> One common problem with 32 bit system call and ioctl emulation
> is the different alignment rules between i386 and 64 bit machines.
> A number of drivers work around this by marking the compat
> structures as 'attribute((packed))', which is not the right
> solution because it breaks all the non-x86 architectures that
> want to use the same compat code.

Why does it break them? It should just make them a little slower.

The network code requires unaligned accesses to work
anyways so if your architecture doesn't support them it is already
remotely crashable.

-Andi

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