bit fields && data tearing

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Tue Sep 9 12:27:14 EST 2014


On 09/08/2014 03:43 PM, James Bottomley wrote:
> 
> This was years ago (possibly decades).  We had to implement in-kernel
> unaligned traps for the networking layer because it could access short
> and int fields that weren't of the correct alignment when processing
> packets.  It that's all corrected now, we wouldn't really notice (except
> a bit of a speed up since an unaligned trap effectively places the
> broken out instructions into the bit stream).
> 
> James
> 

Well, ARM doesn't trap, it just silently gives garbage on unaligned
memory references.

	-hpa




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