Hi Viresh,
On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 12:49 PM Viresh Kumar viresh.kumar@linaro.org wrote:
On 21-10-21, 12:07, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 11:52 AM Viresh Kumar viresh.kumar@linaro.org wrote:
The structure will get aligned to the size of largest element and each element will be aligned to itself. I don't see how this will break even in case of 32/64 bit communication.
Structures are not aligned to the size of the largest element, but to the largest alignment needed for each member.
Right, I was talking in terms of the structures we have here for GPIO. The biggest member here (for any structure) is 32bits long, and compiler shouldn't add extra padding here.
This can be smaller than the size of the largest element. E.g. alignof(long long) might be 4, not 8.
Right.
And m68k aligns to two bytes at most.
Interesting, I assumed that it will be 4bytes for 32 bit systems. So in case of m68k, we will see something like this ?
struct foo { u8 a; // aligned to 2 bytes
// padding of 1 byte u32 b; // aligned to 2 bytes}
Exactly. And on CRIS (no longer supported by Linux), there won't be any padding.
So I recommend to always add explicit padding, to make sure all members are aligned naturally on all systems.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
-- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds