On Thursday 16 June 2011, Alan Stern wrote:

On Thu, 16 Jun 2011, Alexander Holler wrote:

quoted

In commit 139540170d9d9b7ead3caaf540f161756b356d56 the attribute
packed is removed from the structs which are used to access the EHCI-registers.

This is done to circumvent a problem with gcc 4.6, which might access members of
packed structs on a byte by byte basis. But using packed, aligned(4) fixes that
too and is imho the better solution. Otherwise (without packed) the compiler would be free
to choose whatever alignment he thinks fits best, which might be e.g. 8-byte on 64-bit machines.

Is that really true?

No.

I thought the compiler was not allowed to insert 
padding if the natural alignment of the data types didn't require any.

It's architecture dependent. The alignment of the structure is the maximum alignment
of its members, so it gets to be 8 bytes if there is a 64 bit member in the struct
on most architectures, but 4 bytes on x86.

	Arnd