Re: [PATCH 02/02] Elf: Align elf notes properly

[Dave Anderson <anderson@redhat.com>]

>
> > >Therefore we use 4 byte alignment unless it can be shown that the
> > >linux core dumps are a fluke and should be fixed.
> >
> > Ok. Vivek, Dave, anyone? Comments?
> >
>
> IMHO, I think we should go by the specs (8byte boundary alignment on 64bit
> platforms) until and unless it can be proven that specs are wrong. This
> probably will mean that we will break things for sometime (until and unless
> it is fixed in tool chain and probably will also break the capability to use
> an older kernel for capturing dump). But that's unavoidable if we want to be
> compliant to specs.
>
> Thanks
> Vivek

IMHO, why break things if it's not necessary?  As I understand it, you can
still take the course of least resistance and implement 64-bit xen/kdump
vmcores with 4-byte alignment -- and everybody's happy, right?

Unlike other tools that could potentially be broken, the crash utility will have
to maintain backwards compatibility for all the other 4-byte aligned 64-bit
vmcores out there.  So to me, it's more a PITA than anything else, and
I'll just adapt it to whatever's out there...

Thanks,
  Dave