Re: weird padding in linux/timex.h, struct timex

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 2002-08-06 at 12:15, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> struct timex in include/linux/timex.h is defined as 
> 
> struct timex 
> {
> 	...
> 	int  :32; int  :32; int  :32; int  :32;
> 	int  :32; int  :32; int  :32; int  :32;
> 	int  :32; int  :32; int  :32; int  :32;
> }; 
> 
> I assume that this is used as padding. Is there any reason for using
> bitfields as padding? If there is, a comment to that effect would be
> nice. If there isn't, the following patch makes the padding explicit. 
> 

That is how the interface has always been defined. I think we inherited
that from the world of xntpd but I may be wrong. Your __pad is not
always the same thing - you assume 4 byte ints and ints aligned the same
way as char [], which may not always be true.