RE: [PATCH] net/socket: fix GCC8+ Wpacked-not-aligned warnings

[David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM>]

From: Qian Cai 
> Sent: 30 July 2019 14:18
> On Tue, 2019-07-30 at 09:01 +0000, David Laight wrote:
> > From: Qian Cai
> > > Sent: 29 July 2019 21:24
> >
> > ..
> > > To fix this, "struct sockaddr_storage" needs to be aligned to 4-byte as
> > > it is only used in those packed sctp structure which is part of UAPI,
> > > and "struct __kernel_sockaddr_storage" is used in some other
> > > places of UAPI that need not to change alignments in order to not
> > > breaking userspace.
> > >
> > > One option is use typedef between "sockaddr_storage" and
> > > "__kernel_sockaddr_storage" but it needs to change 35 or 370 lines of
> > > codes. The other option is to duplicate this simple 2-field structure to
> > > have a separate "struct sockaddr_storage" so it can use a different
> > > alignment than "__kernel_sockaddr_storage". Also the structure seems
> > > stable enough, so it will be low-maintenance to update two structures in
> > > the future in case of changes.
> >
> > Does it all work if the 8 byte alignment is implicit, not explicit?
> > For instance if unnamed union and struct are used eg:
> >
> > struct sockaddr_storage {
> > 	union {
> > 		void * __ptr;  /* Force alignment */
> > 		struct {
> > 			__kernel_sa_family_t	ss_family;		/* address family */
> > 			/* Following field(s) are implementation specific */
> > 			char	__data[_K_SS_MAXSIZE - sizeof(unsigned short)];
> > 					/* space to achieve desired size, */
> > 					/* _SS_MAXSIZE value minus size of ss_family */
> > 		};
> > 	};
> > };
> >
> > I suspect unnamed unions and structs have to be allowed by the compiler.
> 
> I believe this will suffer the same problem in that will break UAPI,
> 
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190726213045.GL6204@localhost.localdomain/

You are missing the bit where the UAPI structure is packed.
If the compiler won't let you 'pack' a structure that contains structures
(rather than just integers) then the compiler is broken!

The hope here was that it would be ok is the alignment was implicit not explicit.

	David

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