[U-Boot] [PATCH] arm: enable unaligned access on ARMv7

[Rob Herring <robherring2@gmail.com>]

On 06/22/2012 04:15 AM, Albert ARIBAUD wrote:
> Hi Lucas,
> 
> On Tue, 05 Jun 2012 21:06:20 +0200, Lucas Stach <dev@lynxeye.de> wrote:
>> Hi Stephen,
>>
>> Am Dienstag, den 05.06.2012, 12:42 -0600 schrieb Stephen Warren:
>>> On 06/05/2012 11:47 AM, Lucas Stach wrote:
>>>> Recent toolchains default to using the hardware feature for
>>>> unaligned access on ARM v7, rather than doing the software
>>>> fallback. According to ARM this is safe as all v7 implementations
>>>> have to support this feature.
>>>> (http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dui0471c/BABJFFAE.html)
>>>>
>>>> To avoid CPU hangs when doing unaligned memory access, we have to
>>>> turn off alignment checking in our CPU initialisation code.
>>>> (http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dui0491c/CIHCGCFD.html)
>>>
>>> Does this behavior change trickle down to Linux/... too, or would
>>> an OS completely re-initialize this state, and hence not be
>>> affected?
>>>
>>
>> Linux in particular does reinitialize this state and I expect any
>> reasonable OS to do so.
> 
> Then what is the point of enabling it on U-Boot? Does it fix some issue
> whereby some mis-aligned piece of data cannot be properly aligned?
> 

This is a new optimization feature in gcc 4.7 (and backported to some
4.6 versions like the ubuntu 12.04 arm cross compiler (4.6.3)):

http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-dev/2012-June/012360.html

http://seabright.co.nz/2012/06/11/kernel-not-booting-with-linaro-gcc/

If you don't want to enable unaligned accesses, then
"-mno-unaligned-access" needs to be added.

Regards,
Rob