Re: [PATCH v4 1/5] getcpu_cache system call: cache CPU number of running thread

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Monday 29 February 2016 11:32:21 Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 12:39:54AM +0000, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> 
> > /* This structure needs to be aligned cache line size. */
> > struct thread_local_abi {
> >   int32_t  cpu_id;
> >   uint32_t rseq_seqnum;
> >   uint64_t rseq_post_commit_ip;
> >   /* Add new fields at the end. */ 
> > } __attribute__((packed));
> 
> I would really not use packed; that can lead to horrible layout.
> 
> Suppose someone would add:
> 
> 	uint32_t foo;
> 	uint64_t bar;
> 
> With packed, you get an unaligned uint64_t in there, which is horrible.
> Without packed, you get a hole, which you can later fill.

What's making things worse is that on some architectures, adding
__packed will force access by bytes rather than just reading
a 32-bit or 64-bit numbers directly, so it's slow and non-atomic.

	Arnd