Re: checker suggestion

Dawson Engler
2001-06-10T02:04:56Z

> Struct padding is a problem. Really, there shouldn't be any
> implicit padding. This causes:
>
> 1. security leaks when such structs are copied to userspace
> (the implicit padding is uninitialized, and so may contain
> a chunk of somebody's private key or password)
>
> 2. bloat, when struct members could be reordered to eliminate
> the need for padding

(1) is a great point. One of the first extensions in our first system
automatically reordered structure fields to minimize padding (your second
point), but we'd totally missed the security point.

Thanks!