signal, perf: Fix siginfo_t by avoiding u64 on 32-bit architectures

The alignment of a structure is that of its largest member. On architectures like 32-bit Arm (but not e.g. 32-bit x86) 64-bit integers will require 64-bit alignment and not its natural word size. This means that there is no portable way to add 64-bit integers to siginfo_t on 32-bit architectures without breaking the ABI, because siginfo_t does not yet (and therefore likely never will) contain 64-bit fields on 32-bit architectures. Adding a 64-bit integer could change the alignment of the union after the 3 initial int si_signo, si_errno, si_code, thus introducing 4 bytes of padding shifting the entire union, which would break the ABI. One alternative would be to use the __packed attribute, however, it is non-standard C. Given siginfo_t has definitions outside the Linux kernel in various standard libraries that can be compiled with any number of different compilers (not just those we rely on), using non-standard attributes on siginfo_t should be avoided to ensure portability. In the case of the si_perf field, word size is sufficient since there is no exact requirement on size, given the data it contains is user-defined via perf_event_attr::sig_data. On 32-bit architectures, any excess bits of perf_event_attr::sig_data will therefore be truncated when copying into si_perf. Since si_perf is intended to disambiguate events (e.g. encoding relevant information if there are more events of the same type), 32 bits should provide enough entropy to do so on 32-bit architectures. For 64-bit architectures, no change is intended.

MEMarco Elver committed 5 years ago