[Buildroot] Kernel oops on imx53 / ARM - Unhandled fault: alignment exception (0x801)

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Hello,

On Tue, 15 Jul 2014 16:12:06 +0100, amit.chaudhuri at bt.com wrote:

> I am using buildroot to create a toolchain for Freescale's imx53qsb board.  
> Part of the target we're looking for is Qt5 with support for their eglfs 
> platform.
> 
> If I only build part of Qt5 and don't satisfy dependencies for eglfs I get
> a bootable system. When I add all of the dependencies I appear to need, I
> get the relevant Qt5 modules compiled & linked but my kernel dies with 
> "Unhandled fault: alignment exception (0x801) at 0xdf039e16". I've added the
> console error message and disassembly of the crash site below.
> 
> In narrowing down the things that tip me over the edge I've settled on the
> addition of udev and evdev as being likely factors.

Enabling udev/evdev will force the activation of devtmpfs in the
kernel, and therefore the call of the devtmpfs_init() function in the
kernel, which triggers the unaligned access.

> I *think* I need to add -mno-unaligned-access to the compilation flags for
> everything. But I've not worked out how to do that. If alignment is my issue
> how does one add custom compilation flags to all packages?
> 
> If I'm mis-diagnosing the problem, I'd be keen to have that pointed out.
> All help much appreciated..

Basically: run a newer kernel.

My understanding is that this issue has been fixed in newer kernel
versions by allowing unaligned accesses on ARMv6 and ARMv7. The kernel
you're using was at a time where ARMv7 toolchains were not generating
unaligned accesses.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com