Re: [PATCH 0/3] New firewire stack

Kristian Høgsberg
2006-12-05T23:28:38Z

Ray Lee wrote:
> On 12/4/06, Kristian Høgsberg <krh@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Ok... I was planning to make big-endian versions of the structs so
>> that the
>> endian issue would be solved. But if the bit layout is not consistent, I
>> guess bitfields are useless for wire formats. I didn't know that
>> though, I
>> thought the C standard specified that the compiler should allocate
>> bits out of
>> a word using the lower bits first.
>
> The C standard explicitly allows it to be implementation defined.
> Having been bit by this exact problem, I can also recommend never
> using bitfields for anything other than things kept solely in local
> memory.

Yeah, I just read that paragraph in K&R... sigh. Bitfields make the code so
readable, though :) Anyway, I'll rewrite it to use good old shifting and masking.

Kristian