From: Segher Boessenkool <redacted>
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 17:39:52 +0200

Why?  It should logically be an u8 * (and nothing
should ever cast it to anything else, accessor
functions should be used instead to get 32-bit ints
from it, etc.)

Ummm, no.

There are structures there, and other types of objects.

Look at how some of the sparc64 code does this, it's not a "u8 *" by
even the largest stretch of the imagination.