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Date:      Thu, 17 Oct 2002 01:03:20 +1000 (EST)
From:      Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
To:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
Cc:        Jeffrey Hsu <hsu@FreeBSD.ORG>, <net@FreeBSD.ORG>, <arch@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: RFC: eliminating the _IP_VHL hack. 
Message-ID:  <20021017004627.O5865-100000@gamplex.bde.org>
In-Reply-To: <69413.1034756200@critter.freebsd.dk>

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On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> In message <20021016172019.W4358-100000@gamplex.bde.org>, Bruce Evans writes:
> >On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Jeffrey Hsu wrote:
> >
> >>   > The side effect of having some source-files using the _IP_VHL hack and
> >>   > some not is that sizeof(struct ip) varies from file to file, which at
> >>   > best is confusing an at worst the source of some really evil bugs.
> >
> >There is no such effect, or ip would not work.
>
> s/,/ with our current compilers and architectures,/

It is the non-_IP_VHL case that will break.  The _IP_VHL case requires
little more than the existence of uint8_t, which is now required by POSIX.

> >>   > I would therefore propose to eliminate the _IP_VHL hack from the kernel
> >>   > to end this state of (potential) confusion
> >
> >This would remove the least unportable version.
>
> Could be, but there is no point in us having two different versions,
> neither of which is guaranteed to be portable, in particular when
> one of the two is private to FreeBSD and not even consistently used
> there.

I agree that source oce portability is a problem and wasn't helped by
not completing this change.

> For reference:
>
> 	NetBSD hasn't got the _IP_VHL but has a __packed__ on the
> 	structure.

As you may know, I don't like gccisms like __packed__.  NetBSD actually
uses __attribute__(__packed__) like we used to in other places.  Our
__packed doesn't exactly help portability, since it is a syntax error
on systems that don't #define it.

> 	OpenBSD hasn't got the _IP_VHL either, but hasn't adopted
> 	the __packed__ from NetBSD.
>
> 	Linux also uses bitfields and endianess #ifdefs.

There are also an amazing number of unportable bit-fields in <sys/ata.h>
<sys/cdio.h>, <sys/cdrio.h> and <sys/dvdio.h>.  The declarations of these
don't even use endianness #ifdefs or __packed in most cases.  Some
unportabilities are avoided using the gcc extension of small bit-field
types.

> I'll ammend my proposal to include a __packed__ and a CTASSERT on
> the size of struct ip == 20.

I prefer just the CTASSERT until __packed is found to be necessary.

Bruce


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