>> [...disk buffer alignment issues...] > I suspect most disk controllers will have issues if the buffer is not > aligned on at [least] 16bits.
Perhaps. In such cases, something else in the I/O stack - the device driver, most likely, since this is a device-hardware issue - has to compensate. Paying an extra copy penalty for a misaligned buffer may be annoying, but it's better than getting I/O errors or other weird violation of the interface's semantics. The issue for me is not that the hardware does or doesn't have alignment restrictions. It's that they show through to userland (and in a very peculiar way). As someone mentioned upthread, it's possible what's going on is that this hardware has alignment issues (at least when used with our sequencer program) the driver _doesn't_ deal with. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
