<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">i have seen many places in kernel where the variables specially the structures should be of fixed size independent of the architecture. i went through the definitions of them but dint get clearly (or frankly say ...dint get them even a bit) . <br>
</blockquote><div><br>Hi Mohit<br><br>I'm not sure whether we are interpreting your question correctly. Do you mean<br><br>1. you've seen some code in the kernel which you think means the size of a structure/<br>variable (and its resulting binary footprint) is set to be the same (in bytes), <br>
regardless of the architecture, and you are confused about it?<br><br>2. you think that there should be a way of fixing the structure/variable (binary footprint) <br>size to be the same (in bytes) regardless of the architecture and you are wondering if this<br>
is possible?<br><br>In my (uninformed) opinion (2) is not be possible with the kernel due to portability<br>issues - not only do natural word types differ (as others here are explaining) but you <br>have no control over what optimization settings the kernel's user might set in gcc, <br>
for example. This is one of the problems with trying to maintain closed-source drivers<br>and other binary code for the kernel, as I understand.<br><br>Thanks<br>Julie<br></div></div>