[fedora-arm] Fedora 20 for Raspberry Pi????

[Steve Underwood]

On 12/28/2013 12:27 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On 12/27/2013 04:02 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 09:53:54AM +0000, Gordan Bobic wrote:
>>> How is transparent alignment fixup going to give you back the
>>> performance you lose from accesses straddling cache lines?
>>
>> You can have structs straddling cache lines and causing performance
>> problems without alignment issues, or structs being packed too close
>> together causing false sharing again w/o alignment being involved.
>>
>> If alignment problems cause performance issues, then we should deal
>> with those performance problems.  If they don't, we shouldn't worry
>> about them.
>>
>> Rich.
>>
>> ObHack: I once worked with an architecture [68k-based VME hardware]
>> that not only faulted on unaligned access, but also on accesses of the
>> wrong *size* (eg. using a short-sized read instruction instead of a
>> word-sized read instruction).  Dealing with that nonsense involved a
>> lot of compiler-specific massaging of code and some inline assembly ...
>
> I'm very glad you mentioned compilers - this is in fact easily fixable 
> at compiler level. Intel's ICC has an option to make all arrays and 
> structs always aligned to a boundary (up to 16 byte, IIRC). If GCC 
> were to implement such a feature the problem could be made to go away 
> without actually addressing the underlying cause of the problem. It 
> might be a bodge, but since complete fix of the underlying problem 
> isn't going to happen anyway, a good bodge would be a lot better than 
> doing nothing.
>
> Gordan
>
How does this in any way related to the alignment problem? All C 
compilers align arrays and structures in sensible ways by default. They 
have to. Its a requirement of the C language. Problems come from things 
like pointing directly at elements in  communication structures, which 
may not be naturally aligned. They can also come from overriding the 
default alignment of arrays and structures, which most compilers permit 
these days, with a varierty of constructs like "#pragma pack(1)"

Regards,
Steve