Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!NNSC.NSF.NET!craig
From: craig@NNSC.NSF.NET (Craig Partridge)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: re: Unaligned Accesses & Comms.
Message-ID: <8904211834.AA19325@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 19 Apr 89 13:47:39 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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David:

    This is a belated reply to your note.

    I think that for the near future processor speeds and communications
speeds will roughly keep pace.  Or better said, they won't be so out of
sync that we need to radically revise our current networking models
(both virtual circuit and datagram) even into the gigabit speed realm.
[Note that some folks are talking about supporting new communications
paradigms on very high speed networks -- those new paradigms may require
us to revise our networking models -- I'm simply saying that speed alone
won't].

    On the narrower question of alignment, I think some alignment is
always a win.  Note that I don't care if each field is aligned nicely
on a word boundary -- bit masks can grab out stuff from the middle.
What I do care about is not having fields straddle boundaries.  Having
the high-order byte of a two-byte field in one word and the low-order byte
in another word is a nuisance...

Craig