On 2022/06/02 16:38, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
But let's cc the tomoyo and chelsio people.
I think both of them work because the structures are always embedded inside of larger structures that have at least word alignment. This is the thing I was looking for, and the __packed attribute was added in error, most likely copied from somewhere else.
The __packed in "struct tomoyo_shared_acl_head" is to embed next naturally-aligned member of a larger struct into the bytes that would have been wasted if __packed is not specified. For example,
struct tomoyo_shared_acl_head { struct list_head list; atomic_t users; } __packed;
struct tomoyo_condition { struct tomoyo_shared_acl_head head; u32 size; /* Memory size allocated for this entry. */ (...snipped...) };
saves 4 bytes on 64 bits build.
If the next naturally-aligned member of a larger struct is larger than the bytes that was saved by __packed, the saved bytes will be unused.