• Tom Lane's avatar
    Improve packing/alignment annotation for ItemPointerData. · d4b538ea
    Tom Lane authored
    We want this struct to be exactly a series of 3 int16 words, no more
    and no less.  Historically, at least, some ARM compilers preferred to
    pad it to 8 bytes unless coerced.  Our old way of doing that was just
    to use __attribute__((packed)), but as pointed out by Piotr Stefaniak,
    that does too much: it also licenses the compiler to give the struct
    only byte-alignment.  We don't want that because it adds access overhead,
    possibly quite significant overhead.  According to the GCC manual, what
    we want requires also specifying __attribute__((align(2))).  It's not
    entirely clear if all the relevant compilers accept this pragma as well,
    but we can hope the buildfarm will tell us if not.  We can also add a
    static assertion that should fire if the compiler padded the struct.
    
    Since the combination of these pragmas should define exactly what we
    want on any compiler that accepts them, let's try using them wherever
    we think they exist, not only for __arm__.  (This is likely to expose
    that the conditional definitions in c.h are inadequate, but finding
    that out would be a good thing.)
    
    The immediate motivation for this is that the current definition of
    ExecRowMark allows its curCtid field to be misaligned.  It is not clear
    whether there are any other uses of ItemPointerData with a similar hazard.
    We could change the definition of ExecRowMark if this doesn't work, but
    it would be far better to have a future-proof fix.
    
    Piotr Stefaniak, some further hacking by me
    d4b538ea
itemptr.h 3.93 KB