[fedora-arm] Broken sha512sum in coreutils

[Andy Green]

On 01/10/11 11:14, Somebody in the thread at some point said:

>> struct mystruct *p = (struct mystruct *)&buffer[n];
>>
>> On x86 this code is always OK, although it may run faster or slower
>> depending on alignment.
>
> Yes, but in C code this is always a bug, and should always be fixed.

Well, as I said I worked on radiotap which does this and I believe the 
kernel may have code like this for skbs; the network stack 
over-allocates behind the packet and afterwards so the various layers of 
networking protocol can prepend and append stuff to the payload without 
having to copy the payload (see struct skb).  That's quite a powerful 
technique since it can have a lot of value to use a structure to access 
this data in terms of code clarity if nothing else.  But the added stuff 
may be at funny intra-word offsets since it's allocating backwards.

> Even on x86 it may not always generate code that does what you want:
> gcc is perfectly entitled to assume that an unaligned pointer is
> never used.  And even now, x86 has a big performance hit for word
> accesses that straddle a cache line boundary.

I don't know about gcc being able to discard unaligned pointers, and 
have never observed it to my knowledge.  That's just a "C lawyer" 
possibility or actually can happen?

For radiotap parsing, which has structures at arbitrary byte offsets 
depending on what went before, the answer was to use an unaligned struct 
alright but ensure bytewise accessors were used to touch the data.

-Andy