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On Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 11:10:53AM +0100, Denis Ovsienko via tcpdump-workers
wrote:
> Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2022 11:10:53 +0100
> From: Denis Ovsienko <de...@ovsienko.info>
> To: tcpdump-workers@lists.tcpdump.org
> Subject: ARMv7 unaligned access
>
> Hello list.
>
> Based on some prior online research, I used to think that ARMv7 is a
> hardware that allows (by default or after simple tweaking) to terminate
> a userspace process when it tries to perform an unaligned memory
> access. Which is exactly the behaviour wanted for the CI purposes.
>
> Not long ago I moved the linux-armv7l Buildbot worker to a true ARMv7
> board (RPI2B v1.1). Consistent with the documentation [1], the kernel
> seems to have the right knob in place, which a boot-time script sets to
> the desired position:
>
> $ cat /proc/cpu/alignment
> User: 0
> System: 0 (0x0)
> Skipped: 0
> Half: 0
> Word: 0
> DWord: 0
> Multi: 0
> User faults: 4 (signal)
You should probably ask Russell King.
Andrew
>
> However, this does not seem to have any effect, in that this short C
> program, which does trigger a SIGBUS/SIGILL on other OSes and
> architectures that do not like unaligned access, just completes
> successfully on linux-armv7l:
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> #include <stdint.h>
> #include <stddef.h>
> /*
> #include <sys/sysmips.h>
> */
>
> int main (void)
> {
> /*
> sysmips (MIPS_FIXADE, 0);
> */
> uint32_t *p;
> union
> {
> uint32_t u32[2];
> uint8_t u8[8];
> } u;
> u.u32[0] = 0;
> u.u32[1] = 1;
> p = (uint32_t *)(u.u8 + 0);
> *p = 3;
> p = (uint32_t *)(u.u8 + 1);
> *p = 3;
> p = (uint32_t *)(u.u8 + 2);
> *p = 3;
> p = (uint32_t *)(u.u8 + 3);
> *p = 3;
>
> uint8_t u8[20];
> for (size_t i = 0; i < 10; i++)
> {
> p = (uint32_t *)(u8 + i);
> *p = 4;
> }
>
> return 0;
> }
Have you disassembled this to see what instructions it is using? The
compiler has enough information to see you are doing unaligned
accesses, and to use instructions which are efficient and avoid the
unaligned access.
If you do find the compiler is not optimising this, i suggest you ask
Russell King.
Andrew
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