> > 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.

Hmm. OK. You're right.

I was taking a guess that this structure was going
to be used by the wi_write_data routine, too, but it's not.  What 
really should be done is make another fixed size array be an array of
shorts instead of bytes.