[lwip-devel] [bug #50097] Disabling struct packing should be official

[Daniel Elstner]

URL:
  <http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?50097>

                 Summary: Disabling struct packing should be official
                 Project: lwIP - A Lightweight TCP/IP stack
            Submitted by: danielk
            Submitted on: Thu 19 Jan 2017 08:33:20 PM CET
                Category: Documentation
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Feature Request
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None
            lwIP version: git head

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Details:

My project is based on the AVR32 UC3C microcontroller, which does not support
unaligned access. For packed structs, the compiler has to assume byte
alignment and thus generates code that does single byte reads/writes and
combines them to 32-bit words using logic operations.

To avoid having to pay that penalty, I define ETH_PAD_SIZE to 2 in my config
and have this in my cc.h header:

#define LWIP_SKIP_PACKING_CHECK 1
#define PACK_STRUCT_FIELD(x) x
#define PACK_STRUCT_STRUCT
#define PACK_STRUCT_BEGIN
#define PACK_STRUCT_END


This alone accounts for about 6 kiB code size reduction of my flash image. I
haven't made detailed measurements of the runtime speed-up, but the saving
should be to the tune of 6 to 7 cycles per 32-bit word access.

The wiki <http://lwip.wikia.com/wiki/Porting_for_an_OS> hints at the
possibility to disable structure packing, while mentioning that one should
"make sure the system runs stable" when doing so.

Well I did (for several months), and I'm happy to report that it works like a
charm. I also went through all the proto header files and reviewed them to
make sure that none of the proto structs change layout when structure packing
is disabled. All of them appear fine to me.

Thus I think disabling structure packing should perhaps be made an official
configuration option, or at least be mentioned in the reference documentation.




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