If you use the C language, you may have probably wanted to pack your structures so no alignment is done by the compiler. This can be useful for example to build network packets. You can find the basics of packed structures using GCC, here or here.

If everything seems clear, why am I writing this? Today, a coworker has found a bug related to packed structures. The issue was with internal structures (i.e. a substructure). A year ago, or so, I knew that substructures were not packed even if its enclosing structure is packed, but it seems I forgot about it, so I have decided that it was worth writing it here so I do not forget it again (I’m sure I will).

I will take the example found in GCC documentation (only since version 3.4.0). Suppose you have the following code:

struct my_unpacked_struct { char c; int i; }; struct my_packed_struct { char c; int i; struct my_unpacked_struct s; } __attribute__ ((__packed__)); struct my_packed_struct my = { .c = 10, .i = 20, .s.c = 30, .s.i = 40 };

If we generate the assembly for this (I have omitted some things not needed for the example), we will get:

.globl _my .data _my: .byte 10 <--- c .long 20 <--- i .byte 30 <--- s.c .space 3 <--- 3 bytes of alignment .long 40 <--- s.i

As you can see, the compiler has not aligned the internal structure, but the enclosing one. So, what you need to do if you want the internal structure also packed is to pack my_unpacked_struct:

struct my_unpacked_struct { char c; int i; } __attribute__ ((__packed__));

Now, we get what we initially expected:

.globl _my .data _my: .byte 10 <--- c .long 20 <--- i .byte 30 <--- s.c .long 40 <--- s.i

Packing the whole structure my_unpacked_struct is fine if you do not use it anywhere else, but it would be great to use variable attributes (we have used type attributes so far), so we could only pack the internal substructure variable like this (it doesn’t work):

struct my_packed_struct { char c; int i; struct my_unpacked_struct s __attribute__ ((__packed__)); } __attribute__ ((__packed__));

Update 2007/07/25: read the first comment to understand why the variable attribute is not working in this case.

By the way, in the example I have initialized the structure my using designated initializers.

And remember, be careful with packed structures!

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