Re: ARM unaligned MMIO access with attribute((packed))

From: Alan Stern
Date: Tue Apr 26 2011 - 14:51:08 EST


On Tue, 26 Apr 2011, Rabin Vincent wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 21:30, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > As noticed by Peter Maydell, the EHCI device driver in Linux gets
> > miscompiled by some versions of arm-gcc (still need to find out which)
> > due to a combination of problems:
> >
> > 1. In include/linux/usb/ehci_def.h, struct ehci_caps is defined
> > with __attribute__((packed)), for no good reason. This is clearly
> > a bug and needs to get fixed, but other drivers have the same bug
>
> Was a patch submitted for this? I couldn't find it in the archives.
> U-Boot seems to be fixing this by adding an "aligned(4)" instead
> of removing the packed:
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/u-boot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg51418.html

ISTR a patch was submitted, but apparently it never got picked up.

> > and it used to work. The attribute forces byte access on all members
> > accessed through pointer dereference, which is not allowed on
> > MMIO accesses in general. The specific code triggering the problem
> > in Peter's case is in ehci-omap.c:
> >        omap->ehci->regs = hcd->regs
> >                + HC_LENGTH(readl(&omap->ehci->caps->hc_capbase));
>
> In my case it's this writel() in ehci-hub.c that gets chopped into
> strbs:
>
> /* force reset to complete */
> ehci_writel(ehci, temp & ~(PORT_RWC_BITS | PORT_RESET),
> status_reg);

Why would that get messed up? The status_reg variable doesn't have any
__atribute__((packed)) associated with it.

Alan Stern

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/