[PATCH, AARCH64] align long branch stubs

[Jim Wilson]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 10:43 PM, Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 10:16 PM, Jim Wilson <jim.wilson@linaro.org> wrote:
>> I got a bug report from Qualcomm that says if you set the A bit in the
>> SCTLR register, to trap on unaligned accesses, their code fails,
>> because the toolchain itself is emitting unaligned data accesses.
>
>
> That should not matter.  Setting bit A on the SCTLR register is not a
> valid thing to do for A class processors.
> Not that it is a problem in general to align the data after all but it
> should not matter in general.

I think what you mean here is that it is wrong to permanently set bit
A in SCTLR on a multiuser multiprogrammed server running Linux.  But
on a single user device, being used for software development and
testing, I don't see why it is wrong to set the A bit in SCTLR,
perhaps temporarily, to verify that code has been correctly written
and compiled to avoid unaligned accesses which are slower than aligned
accesses.  This should work, and can work, if the toolchain stops
emitting unaligned data in long branch stubs.

Jim