[Dnsmasq-discuss] [PATCH] Fix alignment issue

Alex Landau landau_alex at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 6 06:24:39 BST 2007


--- "richardvoigt at gmail.com" <richardvoigt at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 8/5/07, Alex Landau <landau_alex at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I compiled dnsmasq for Blackfin (an embedded MMU-less CPU running uClinux)
> > and
> > encountered the following problem: whenever dnsmasq is about to send a DNS
> > reply it gets
> > a SIGBUS due to an unaligned memory access.
> >
> > I traced the issue and the patch below fixes that.
> > The problem was in the cache_insert() function that receives (all_addr
> > *addr) and
> > memcpy's it somewhere else (at the "if (addr)" statement near the end).
> > With -O2, gcc
> > sees that addr is a pointer to a struct at least 4 bytes in size and
> > replaces the memcpy
> > with a single 4-byte memory fetch and memory store (4-byte since I
> > disabled IPv6).
> > Sometimes addr is not 4-bytes aligned (e.g. when called from
> > extract_addresses(), the
> > addr parameter is casted from p1 which is a char *). In my situation this
> > caused addr to
> > not be 4 bytes aligned which caused the SIGBUS.
> >
> > The patch below tells gcc that the struct all_addr is packed, so gcc will
> > not assume it
> > is aligned and will generate the call to memcpy instead of optimizing it.
> 
> 
> Does dnsmasq only compile on gcc?  AFAIK __attribute__ is not supported by
> all compilers.
> 

Well, I don't know if other compilers are used. __attribute__ is indeed gcc specific (but
IIRC, Intel compiler for Linux uses them too). For other compilers there should be
pragmas or whatever that do the same. In my opinion, this is the cleanest solution to the
alignment problem that might happen on any CPU not allowing unaligned memory access.

#if defined(__GNUC__)
#define PACKED __attribute__((packed))
#elsif defined(something_else)
#define PACKED other stuff
#else
#define PACKED
#endif

struct { .... } PACKED;

BTW, After sending the mail, I ran a few more tests on the original version, and noticed
that pings (that cause DNS lookups) from one computer (running Debian Etch) cause a
SIGBUS, while pings from another (running Kubuntu Edgy) don't. Don't know what's the
reason. Maybe the length of the name to be resolved...

Alex


       
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