[PATCH] ARM: decompressor: clear SCTLR.A bit for v7 cores
From: Russell King - ARM Linux <hidden>
Date: 2012-10-11 13:09:56
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 07:43:22AM -0500, Rob Herring wrote:
The contents of this were already reviewed on this thread, so I sent this to the patch system and this was Russell's reply:
So that's why I couldn't find it - the mailing list thread has a different subject line to the patch. Don't do that. Given the amount of list traffic we have today, that's as good as not having been posted at all.
quoted
NAK for two reasons. 1. It hasn't been on the list (I can't find a match for "clear SCTLR.A" in my mailbox) 2. The behaviour of unaligned accesses vary depending on CPU. Some fix-up the access, others load the word and then rotate it. If we have decompressors which perform unaligned accesses, we need to fix this properly to avoid the CPU specific behaviour, rather than tweaking control bits to hide the problem.I'm simply matching the behavior of the kernel itself. The A bit is cleared for v7 kernels and compilers only generate unaligned accesses for v7. Without this the initial state of the A bit is undefined as a bootloader could have cleared it already. We should document the required state or set it to what we want.
Irrespective of this, (2) still stands. Unaligned accesses in the decompressor without a fixup (which will be very hard to provide) will return different data depending on the CPU as I mention in point 2. So, using unaligned accesses in the decompressor may not give expected results in all cases, so they're best avoided. And if they're avoided, then we don't care about the setting of the A bit.