-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Somebody in the thread at some point said: | Am Mi 27. August 2008 schrieb Andy Green: |> Somebody in the thread at some point said: |> | HI: |> | Yes. it works after remove "__attribute__((__packed__))" |> | |> | #arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-objdump -d ./cpu/arm920t/s3c24x0/spi.o |> | .... |> | d0: e59d2004 ldr r2, [sp, #4] |> | d4: e3a0304f mov r3, #79 ; 0x4f |> | d8: e582300c str r3, [r2, #12] |> | dc: e59d2004 ldr r2, [sp, #4] |> | e0: e3a03001 mov r3, #1 ; 0x1 |> | e4: e5823008 str r3, [r2, #8] |> | e8: e59d2004 ldr r2, [sp, #4] |> | ec: e283301e add r3, r3, #30 ; 0x1e |> | f0: e5823000 str r3, [r2] |> | f4: e3a01000 mov r1, #0 ; 0x0 |> | f8: e2811001 add r1, r1, #1 ; 0x1 |> | fc: e59d2004 ldr r2, [sp, #4] |> | 100: e3a030ff mov r3, #255 ; 0xff |> | |> | I see the same problem, if use "__packed__" attribute, GCC |> | will compile with byte-access code which may takes more |> | instruction. Say, update a counter, and it can't keep it ATOMIC access, |> | may produce race, or data corrupt. |> |> You need __packed__ if the start of your struct pointer may not be |> aligned to 32-bit boundary, but you want to access 32-bit items in |> there. This happens in network processing code for example, the struct |> representing the packet payload can easily be at funny alignment due to |> snipped headers from earlier protocols. |> |> You don't need it for dealing with a bunch of 32-bit registers always |> found on 32-bit boundaries. | | I remember when writing TTY-driver code in assembler for BS2000 back in 1985, | there were all sorts of PACK and ALIGN16 and ALIGN32 directives to cope with | that. There was good reason they were there. | Think in COBOL-M there were similar options for data and linkage section. | | Just a nearly OT annotation ;-) Sorry couldn't resist as these low-level | machine interfaces were my favorite battlefield
Those align things are still alive and well in linker scripts FWIW. But this is actually different story. The problem comes when the guys you need aligned are inside a struct that does correctly position them at alignment boundary -- relative to struct start. If the address of the start of the struct is not itself aligned to the machine word size though, that doesn't help at all. So a u32 at +8 from the struct start looks like it follows the rules great, but if the struct pointer is pointing to 0x1, you are screwed when you try to dereference that u32 in one 32-bit access at 0x9. __packed__ is magic get out of jail card for that case. - -Andy -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAki22ncACgkQOjLpvpq7dMoSiACggGUXm/LP1gvzwg3vLKcd/RB5 dbkAnih1Gu7obDea6WeVZ2jSz+CZpReD =RTQC -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
