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ARM: 6508/1: vexpress: Correct data alignment in headsmp.S for CONFIG…
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…_THUMB2_KERNEL

Directives such as .long and .word do not magically cause the
assembler location counter to become aligned in gas.  As a
result, using these directives in code sections can result in
misaligned data words when building a Thumb-2 kernel
(CONFIG_THUMB2_KERNEL).

This is a Bad Thing, since the ABI permits the compiler to
assume that fundamental types of word size or above are word-
aligned when accessing them from C.  If the data is not really
word-aligned, this can cause impaired performance and stray
alignment faults in some circumstances.

In general, the following rules should be applied when using
data word declaration directives inside code sections:

    * .quad and .double:
         .align 3

    * .long, .word, .single, .float:
         .align (or .align 2)

    * .short:
        No explicit alignment required, since Thumb-2
        instructions are always 2 or 4 bytes in size.
        immediately after an instruction.

Reviewed-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Martin <dave.martin@linaro.org>
Acked-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
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Dave Martin authored and Russell King committed Nov 30, 2010
1 parent 725ca4a commit 618d9c8
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 0 deletions.
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions arch/arm/mach-vexpress/headsmp.S
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -35,5 +35,6 @@ pen: ldr r7, [r6]
*/
b secondary_startup

.align
1: .long .
.long pen_release

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