Re: NS83820 2.6.0-test5 driver seems unstable on IA64

David S. Miller
2003-09-23T19:17:45Z

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 21:09:47 +0200
Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de> 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.