On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:15:53 +0000 (GMT)
Daniel Drake <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Being spoilt by the luxuries of i386/x86_64 I've never really had a good
> grasp on unaligned memory access problems on other architectures and decided
> it was time to figure it out. As a result I've written this documentation
> which I plan to submit for inclusion as
> Documentation/unaligned_memory_access.txt
>
> Before I do so, any comments on the following?
>
A very nice, and much needed document. I think you should include one thing
though:
memcpy() is _only_ safe when one of the pointers is char* or void*. If it is
anything more complex than that, gcc will assume alignment and optimise based
on that. E.g. memcpy() of two long:s generates the same assembly as doing an
assignment.
(Technically it is no different for char* and void*, but since they have byte
alignment, gcc can't really do anything creative.)
Rgds
--
-- Pierre Ossman
Linux kernel, MMC maintainer http://www.kernel.org
PulseAudio, core developer http://pulseaudio.org
rdesktop, core developer http://www.rdesktop.org
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