boundary | | struct taskstats - 328 bytes | +-+------------------------------+ The iotop code expects that the kernel will behave as it did then, assuming that the packet format is set in stone. The format is set in stone, but the packet offsets are not. There's nothing in the packet format that guarantees that the packet will be sent in exactly the same way. The attribute contents are set (or versioned) and the aggregate contents are set but they can be anywhere in the packet. The issue here isn't that an unaligned structure gets passed to userspace, it's that the NLA infrastructure has something of a weakness: The 4 byte attribute header may force the payload to be unaligned. The taskstats structure is created at an unaligned location and then 64-bit values are operated on inside the kernel, so the unaligned access warnings gets spewed everywhere. It's possible to use the unaligned access API to operate on the structure in the kernel but it seems like a wasted effort to work around userspace code that isn't following the packet format. Any new additions would also need the be worked around. It's a maintenance nightmare. The conclusion of the earlier discussion seemed to be "ok fine, if we have to break it, don't break it on arches that don't have the problem." Dave pointed out that the unaligned access problem doesn't only exist on ia64, but also on other 64-bit arches that don't have efficient unaligned access and it should be fixed there as well. The committed version of the patch and this addition keep with the conclusion of that discussion not to break it unnecessarily, which the pid padding and the packet padding fixes did do. x86_64 and powerpc don't suffer this problem so they shouldn't suffer the solution. Other 64-bit architectures do and will, though. Signed-off-by: Jeff Mahoney Reported-by: David S. Miller Acked-by: David S. Miller Cc: Dan Carpenter Cc: Balbir Singh Cc: Florian Mickler Cc: Guillaume Chazarain Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds x\z9–-x