On Tue, 26 Jul 2011, Dave Martin wrote:

Currently, it's possible to set the kernel to ignore alignment
faults when changing the alignment fault handling mode at runtime
via /proc/sys/alignment, even though this is undesirable on ARMv6
and above, where it can result in infinite spins where an un-fixed-
up instruction repeatedly faults.

This may be the case only if the U bit in CP15 reg 1 is set, right?

In addition, the kernel clobbers any alignment mode specified on
the command-line if running on ARMv6 or above.

This patch factors out the necessary safety check into a couple of
new helper functions, and checks and modifies the fault handling
mode as appropriate on boot and on writes to /proc/cpu/alignment.

Prior to ARMv6, the behaviour is unchanged.

For ARMv6 and above, the behaviour changes as follows:

  * Attempting to ignore faults on ARMv6 results in the mode being
    forced to UM_FIXUP instead.  A warning is printed if this
    happened as a result of a write to /proc/cpu/alignment.  The
    user's UM_WARN bit (if present) is still honoured.

Why not clearing the U bit as well as the A bit to preserve consistency 
with the pre ARMv6 behavior?


Nicolas