On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 11:42 AM, David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Jesse Gross <redacted>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 11:22:11 -0700

quoted

The suggestion that Geert made was to just drop this entirely and
rely on the natural alignment from these values.

Indeed, Geert's patch was 1,000 times superior to this one.

I looked through the struct definition and I think that the idea of
manually padding as Geert did in his patch will be difficult to
maintain over time (and actually there are a few that he missed) since
there are a number of different structs/unions contained in there.
Dropping the alignment specifier completely still has the same
potential problem on architectures where the size and alignment of
long are not the same.

Maybe the easiest thing to do at this point is just to always align it
to 8 bytes.