* Eric W. Biederman ebiederman@lnxi.com [041129 19:21]:
To see what the problem actually amounts to I walked through my compiler collection with a simple test to see what sizeof reported for lb_memory_range, (without adding the packed attribute).
On 32bit x86 I tested with: gcc-2.7.2 gcc-2.95 gcc-3.0 gcc-3.2 gcc-3.3 gcc-3.4
And in each instance the result was 20.
So from what I can see with 32bit x86 code we are consistent, and we do not have compiler version dependencies. So the bad definition is consistent.
x86 QNX/Neutrino 6.2.1 (with gcc 2.95.3): # gcc -v Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/ntox86/2.95.3qnx-nto/specs gcc version 2.95.3qnx-nto 20010315 (release)
sizeof(lb_memory_range): 24 sizeof(struct lb_memory): 8
It seems gcc does not always behave the same.
It is a good pragmatic solution, but actually needing __attribute__ ((packed)) is an issue. As Ron has pointed out, not all compilers support it. And having a definition that varies between 32bit and 64bit is a problem anyway.
So you are saying people out there are building LinuxBIOS with non-gnu compilers? I actually doubt that, assuming a lot of objcopy/objdump/ld magic is pretty much gnu specific as well..
one could go like:
#ifdef __GNUC__ #define STRICTSIZE __attribute__ ((packed)) #else #define STRICTSIZE #endif
Fixing the issue among all gcc versions while not breaking anything on others. It really sucks that gcc does magic here that makes writing portable code really ugly.
Stefan