On Fri, 2007-06-15 at 15:27 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > Hopefully everybody who deploys these systems knows this. It seems > like a open death trap to me, especially since the consequences > are so severe: remote packet of death, could be a recall for > a network conntected embedded device that doesn't easily allow > firmware update. And they would rightfully blame Linux. > > It would be much safer if the parts of the stack that weren't > audited/tested were marked this way and check for BROKEN_UNALIGNED or > similar.
If we did the get_probably_unaligned() thing, then on architectures where we _do_ trap and fix up, we could actually spit out a warning whenever we hit a trap and it _wasn't_ marked with get_probably_unaligned(). > Also frankly I'm surprised that whoever designed these systems > didn't learn from the old M68000 who made this mistake the first time. Mostly, the machines which can't handle traps are the machines which don't even have an MMU. Why add hardware when you don't really need it? Fundamentally, it isn't a hardware design flaw. You could perhaps ask interesting questions about whether Linux is _really_ the right software to be using on them, but the fact remains that Linux _is_ the software people are using on them. -- dwmw2 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/