Re: How to emulate lw/sw instruction by lb/sb instruction

[Ulrich Eckhardt <eckhardt@satorlaser.com>]

On Monday 25 September 2006 02:41, william_lei@ali.com.tw wrote:
> Could someone tell me how to modify GCC as titled?because we have met
> problem while porting some middleware,which will generate some lw/sw
> instruction to unaligned address,so I would modify GCC to not generate
> lw/sw instructions for this pieces code.

I'm not exactly sure what problem you are facing but if I understand you 
correctly and you have code that simply does misaligned accesses, you would 
be better off fixing the code. The reason is that such unaligned accesses 
would have to be emulated with bytewise access and combining/dissecting the 
values accordingly, which hurts performance (processing and cache). Even when 
run on x86 (where such accesses don't cause bus errors) this would be the 
better choice, because even there these are emulated in hardware and only 
cause hidden performance losses.

Other than that, I would rather filter the output of GCC, i.e. use -S (or what 
it was) to generate assembler code and then replace the lw/sw instructions 
via your $FAVOURITE_TEXTPROCESSING_TOOL in the affected files. Most other 
software isn't that broken and would only suffer from such changes.

Thinking about it, I believe there is also a way (some __attribute__) to tell 
GCC that some pointer is not aligned and it will then output suitable code 
for unaligned accesses. This requires changes to the generated sourcecode 
though, but would be a rather clean solution because it would work on other 
platforms, too.

Just wondering, what middleware are you talking about?

Uli


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