On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 11:24:02PM +0100, Manfred Spraul wrote:It seems it's Alpha:
I think one platform (early ARM?) cannot access bytes directly, and implement the access with read 16-bit, change 8-bit, write back 16 bit.
Nope.
FreeBSD doesn't try to be portable any more, but Linux does, and there are
architectures where 8- and 16-bit accesses aren't *atomic* but have to be
done with read-modify-write cycles.
And even for fields like "age", where we don't care whether the age itself
is 100% accurate, we _do_ care that the fields close-by don't get strange
effects from updating "age". We used to have exactly this problem on alpha
back in the 2.1.x timeframe.