Problem with malloc on PA

Matthew Wilcox willy@ldl.fc.hp.com
Wed Apr 25 14:29:00 GMT 2001


The PA-RISC architecture requires a lock to be 16-byte aligned.  So we
add __attribute__((aligned (16))) to our lock type and that aligns it
to a 16-byte offset within the struct.  But if the struct isn't 16-byte
aligned, this loses.

malloc() currently returns pointers which are 8-byte aligned.  Would it
be possible to change it so that they're 16-byte aligned?  I took a quick
look at the code, and I saw MALLOC_ALIGN_MASK, but I'm not sure exactly
what effects simply changing this would have.  I suspect I would want
to change MALLOC_ALIGNMENT as well, but not SIZE_SZ?

help greatly appreciated.



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