From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Grant Grundler Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 18:51:04 +0000 Subject: Re: NS83820 2.6.0-test5 driver seems unstable on IA64 Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 02:29:25PM -0400, Benjamin LaHaise wrote: ... > (yet another hardware issue pushed off on software for no significant gain). Even x86 pays at least a one cycle penalty for every misaligned access. In general, open source code has no excuse for using misaligned fields. It's (mostly) avoidable. TCP/IP headers are the historical exception. One could make the same arguement that a modern NIC should not require 16 byte alignment for DMA. It's a tradeoff one way or the other. Just a matter of perspective. grant