On 8/5/05, Carl Whitwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 8/4/05, Shaun Jackman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Are you using an x86 host and an arm target? > > Actually no, my major concern at the time was the large quantity of > legacy code with packed structures that we have on an embedded linux > x86 system. I was just testing that we didn't have an issue there with > the structure access.
The x86 includes hardware to fetch a word from an unaligned address by fetching from two aligned address and shifting and combining to produce the correct result. So, unaligned accesses on the x86 might effect a slight performance hit, but they will still act correctly. The ARM on the other hand does not include such hardware, so a load instruction fetching from an unaligned address will behave incorrectly. My primary concern is really just code correctness. Cheers, Shaun
