Pay attention, it's not legacy, there are real actual reasons to do
that.
Read again thru Theo's mail, carefully.
Pay attention, this wasn't a response to Theo's mail.
What I get from Theo's email is a detailed description of a
cross-platform OS robustness issue, given limited testing resources.
Legacy would suggest to me more of a historical burden that could go
away if the offending software were removed.
Anyways, this particular example seems like it should be simple.
Huh???
I really, really don't want to have this conversation, but somehow
words of mine appears here out of context. The word legacy doesn't
have anything to do with the mail that Theo de Raadt sent. It was
a response I sent to Stuart Henderson talking about __this__ thread
he sent me:
https://marc.info/?t=151933630600003&r=1&w=2
My impression was that the port was first develped for an architecture
before ARMv6, without hardware support for unaligned memory access,
that is why I used the word legacy.
I know, the mail arrived after that, but sometimes I have to stop
composing a mail to do something, then I came back, etc.
Now, about "Theo's mail" (good title for a movie, by the way):
I understand the advantages of the diverse environment, and I read
before about the good it has done to the OpenBSD code, specially
sparc.
So yes, I understand that you like to have ports with strict
alignment memory access.
But that has to be made when the architecture demands it.
I know that aligned access would be faster, and if you craft code
made explicitly with that in mind, and if what the code does, it
does it without loosing performance for being restricted in an
aligned paradigm, the code will be faster.
But you install an OS to run code in it, and even if that code is
made taking on account strict alignment, I doubt that the
performance, especially with multimedia applications would be better
with the jiggle that code would have to do in software to achieve
the same it would be done in hardware using unaligned access.
And permitting unaligned access doesn't mean that you can't choose when
to use it. Do not clang or gcc take on acount that when placing variables
for example?
Maybe that was the situation before or even with ARMv6, I don't
know, but I don't think that is the case for the processors you
support in the armv7 port.
I mean, even for the stm32f the arm library uses unaligned access
for performance reasons.
So the only reason I see here is the canary in the coal mine. But you
are cutting legs and stapling wings to this poor bastard...
That is my opinion.
Now let me out of this.
Please.
adr.
