tracepoints: Fix section alignment using pointer array
Make the tracepoints more robust, making them solid enough to handle compiler changes by not relying on anything based on compiler-specific behavior with respect to structure alignment. Implement an approach proposed by David Miller: use an array of const pointers to refer to the individual structures, and export this pointer array through the linker script rather than the structures per se. It will consume 32 extra bytes per tracepoint (24 for structure padding and 8 for the pointers), but are less likely to break due to compiler changes. History: commit 7e066fb8 tracepoints: add DECLARE_TRACE() and DEFINE_TRACE() added the aligned(32) type and variable attribute to the tracepoint structures to deal with gcc happily aligning statically defined structures on 32-byte multiples. One attempt was to use a 8-byte alignment for tracepoint structures by applying both the variable and type attribute to tracepoint structures definitions and declarations. It worked fine with gcc 4.5.1, but broke with gcc 4.4.4 and 4.4.5. The reason is that the "aligned" attribute only specify the _minimum_ alignment for a structure, leaving both the compiler and the linker free to align on larger multiples. Because tracepoint.c expects the structures to be placed as an array within each section, up-alignment cause NULL-pointer exceptions due to the extra unexpected padding. (this patch applies on top of -tip) Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com> Acked-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net> LKML-Reference: <20110126222622.GA10794@Krystal> CC: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com> CC: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> CC: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> CC: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> CC: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> CC: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Loading
Please register or sign in to comment