This past week I was playing around with that pahole tool
(http://oops.ghostprotocols.net:81/acme/dwarves/) and looking at the size
of various struct in the kernel.  I was surprised by the size of the
task_struct on x86_64, approaching 4K.  I looked through the fields in
task_struct and found that a number of them were declared as "unsigned
long" rather than "unsigned int" despite them appearing okay as 32-bit
sized fields.  On x86_64 "unsigned long" ends up being 8 bytes in size and
forces 8 byte alignment.  Is there a reason there a reason they are
"unsigned long"?

The patch below drops the size of the struct from 3808 bytes (60 64-byte
cachelines) to 3760 bytes (59 64-byte cachelines).  A couple other fields
in the task struct take a signficant amount of space:

struct thread_struct       thread;               688
struct held_lock           held_locks[30];       1680

CONFIG_LOCKDEP is turned on in the .config

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix printk warnings]
Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>