Re: alignment faults in 3.6

On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 08:20 -0500, Rob Herring wrote:

On 10/11/2012 07:40 AM, Eric Dumazet wrote:

quoted

On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 12:28 +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

quoted

Rob Herring as the original reporter has dropped off the Cc list, adding
him back.

I assume that the calxeda xgmac driver is the culprit then. It uses
netdev_alloc_skb() rather than netdev_alloc_skb_ip_align() in
xgmac_rx_refill but it is not clear whether it does so intentionally
or by accident.

This in fact does work and eliminates the unaligned traps. However, not
all h/w can do IP aligned DMA (i.MX FEC for example), so I still think
this is a questionable optimization by the compiler. We're saving 1 load
instruction here for data that is likely already in the cache. It may be
legal per the ABI, but the downside of this optimization is much greater
than the upside.

Compiler is asked to perform a 32bit load, it does it.

There is no questionable optimization here. Really.
Please stop pretending this, this makes no sense.

As I said, if some h/w cannot do IP aligned DMA, driver can use a
workaround, or a plain memmove() (some drivers seems to do this to work
around this h/w limitation, just grep for memmove() in drivers/net)

quoted

Thanks Arnd

It seems an accident, since driver doesnt check skb->data alignment at
all (this can change with SLAB debug on/off)

It also incorrectly adds 64 bytes to bfsize, there is no need for this.

I'm pretty sure this was needed as the h/w writes out full bursts of
data, but I'll go back and check.

Maybe the ALIGN() was needed then. But the 64 + NE_IP_ALIGN sounds like
the head room that we allocate/reserve in netdev_alloc_skb_ip_align()

So you allocate this extra room twice.

Thanks