Hi Greg,
[snip]
This is not needed in any of the older kernels, despite what the stable@ line said, as it ends up taking a lot of memory up for all other arches. That's why I only applied it to the one kernel version. I'm betting that it will be eventually reverted when people notice it as well :)
That very well might become the case but then we're back to the initial problem, right? So maybe some other more future-proof solution should be implemented?
Possibly yes.
See initially we discussed simple explicit 8-byte alignment which won't change data layout for most of arches while fixing our issue on ARC but for some reason people were not happy with that proposal and that's how we ended-up with what we discuss here now.
I'm not disagreeing that this is a valid solution for you, I wasn't part of the original discussion, sorry. Just that this probably isn't something that should be backported to older kernels at this point in time.
That's fine for now.
Then if it ever gets reverted in Linux tree hopefully I'll be CCed and it will be enough time to come up with a better fix.
-Alexey