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From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
To: dwarves@vger.kernel.org
Subject: pahole treats embedded structures a holes
Date: Thu, 28 May 2026 07:11:52 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20260528051152.GA27820@lst.de> (raw)

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Hi all,

this is a pretty old bug as far as I can tell, but I finally tried to
track it down and failed.

When running dwarves, both the package in Debian testing and a build of
todays git tree on Debian testing, it treats a lot of C structures
embedded into others as holes instead of having a size for them.  I
think this generally structures defined in other header files and
not the file containing the offending struct.

E.g. if I run pahole on fs/xfs/xfs_buf.o on a current mainline kernel,
the output for struct xfs_buf starts like this:

struct xfs_buf {
        struct rhash_head          b_rhash_head;         /*     0     0 */

        /* XXX 8 bytes hole, try to pack */

        xfs_daddr_t                b_rhash_key;          /*     8     8 */

struct rhash_head is a single pointer, so 8 bytes on x86-64, and
xfs_daddr_t is also a 64-bit type, so both the 0 size and the 8
byte hole are clearly wrong.  The kernel .config is attached in case
it matter.

[-- Attachment #2: config.gz --]
[-- Type: application/x-gzip, Size: 26863 bytes --]

             reply	other threads:[~2026-05-28  5:11 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2026-05-28  5:11 Christoph Hellwig [this message]
2026-05-28 13:39 ` pahole treats embedded structures a holes Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo
2026-05-28 13:58   ` Christoph Hellwig
2026-05-28 19:48     ` Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo
2026-05-29  4:02       ` Christoph Hellwig
2026-05-29 19:28         ` Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2026-06-05 19:28 Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo

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