Re: [Slightly off topic] A question about R/B trees.

["Chris Friesen" <cfriesen@nortel.com>]

Maxim Levitsky wrote:

> Say you allocate a piece of memory using kmalloc, and write there, a
> structure that contains a r/b tree item. I agree that gcc will ensure
> that offset from start of that structure to first byte of the tree
> item will be aligned.
> 
> But what if malloc returned a misaligned pointer? This will ensure
> that virtual address of the tree item won't be aligned. (I know it
> doesn't, but this isn't a assumption about gcc anymore)

malloc() can't return a misaligned pointer.  From the spec:  "The 
pointer returned if the allocation succeeds shall be suitably aligned so 
that it may be assigned to a pointer to any type of object..."

Chris