> Having the structure be naturally aligned probably helps performance
> on all platforms, in addition to making the mips one work at all.

What do you mean by "properly aligned" for a byte array? Sorry to insist here,
it's just the point you are trying to make is not clear to me.

Either this is a structure defined by hardware, then there is no way to
circumvent this (non-)alignement, or it's a badly designed data structure,
then we should fix it as you suggest (but why align only to 16bit then,
actually why use fixed-sized-types at all), or it's some missuse of casts in
the wi driver, then we should fix that.


Martin