On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 01:16:59PM +0100, Matthias Maennich wrote:

This change allows growing struct kernel_symbol without wasting bytes to
alignment. It also concretized the alignment of ksymtab entries if
relative references are used for ksymtab entries.

struct kernel_symbol was already implicitly being aligned to the word
size, except on x86_64 and m68k, where it is aligned to 16 and 2 bytes,
respectively.

As far as I can tell there is no requirement for aligning struct
kernel_symbol to 16 bytes on x86_64, but gcc aligns structs to their
size, and the linker aligns the custom __ksymtab sections to the largest
data type contained within, so setting KSYM_ALIGN to 16 was necessary to
stay consistent with the code generated for non-ASM EXPORT_SYMBOL(). Now
that non-ASM EXPORT_SYMBOL() explicitly aligns to word size (8),
KSYM_ALIGN is no longer necessary.

In case of relative references, the alignment has been changed
accordingly to not waste space when adding new struct members.

As for m68k, struct kernel_symbol is aligned to 2 bytes even though the
structure itself is 8 bytes; using a 4-byte alignment shouldn't hurt.

I manually verified the output of the __ksymtab sections didn't change
on x86, x86_64, arm, arm64 and m68k. As expected, the section contents
didn't change, and the ELF section alignment only changed on x86_64 and
m68k. Feedback from other archs more than welcome.

Co-developed-by: Martijn Coenen <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Martijn Coenen <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Matthias Maennich <maennich@google.com>

Ick, messy, nice fix.

Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>