Re: NS83820 2.6.0-test5 driver seems unstable on IA64

Andrew Morton
2003-09-23T23:15:29Z

"David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> > That's not true; they could be avoided by using get_unaligned() and
> > put_unaligned(). You just don't want to because they'd make sparc suck.
>
> Not only sparc would be effected by this. Using {get,put}_unaligned()
> all over the networking would incur a penalty for many platforms, not
> just sparc.

Really? I'd have thought that get/put_unaligned would be a simple
load/store for architectures which wish to implement it in that manner.

Other architectures could take it as an optimisation hint, to avoid taking
a trap. They'd probably still need to implement the fixup, but if a few of
these hints could reduce the trap frequency significantly then it may be
worth doing?

I guess it depends on how many of these hints would be needed at the source
level to avoid "most" of the traps.