Re: [PATCH] ARM: alignment: setup alignment handler earlier

From: Catalin Marinas
Date: Wed Sep 07 2011 - 13:25:11 EST


On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 06:04:52PM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 05:42:19PM +0100, Måns Rullgård wrote:
> > There are such instructions (ldrd, ldm), but gcc will not emit those
> > unless the address is known to be aligned. For ARMv6 and later, gcc 4.6
> > *will* emit potentially unaligned ldr and ldrh since these very clearly
> > allow an unaligned address and are faster than the alternatives in all
> > implementations to date. This is unless strict alignment checking is
> > explicitly enabled, which unfortunately the Linux kernel does for no
> > apparent reason at all.
>
> "no apparant reason at all" heh. The reason is to keep the code
> simple and free from bugs. To do otherwise means that each of the
> CPU files needs to be littered with ifdefs to deal with the alignment
> fault configuration, of which there are 16 of them (ignoring v6 and v7.)
>
> If you think code maintanence of the same thing in 16 places is efficient
> then I guess there is "no apparant reason". I beg to differ, being one
> of those folk who have had to edit 18 different places several times.
>
> So no, I do not intend to move this:
>
> #ifdef CONFIG_ALIGNMENT_TRAP
> orr r0, r0, #CR_A
> #else
> bic r0, r0, #CR_A
> #endif
>
> into 16 separate places in the kernel.

What about something like this (untested):

#if defined(CONFIG_ALIGNMENT_TRAP) && __LINUX_ARM_ARCH__ < 6
orr r0, r0, #CR_A
#else
bic r0, r0, #CR_A
#endif

--
Catalin
--
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/