From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "David S. Miller" Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 19:01:10 +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, 23 Sep 2003 21:09:47 +0200 Andreas Schwab wrote: > The compiler is allowed to take advantage that there are no unaligned > accesses. You need to use compiler extensions (like attribute packed) to > stop it from doing this. That's correct, and if the address is misaligned the cpu "traps" and the kernel fixes up the load/store access to fix it up. This unaligned trap handling is required for a port of Linux to a given cpu architecture. That's what we're talking about here.