RE: [lwip-users] Misalignment problems on PowerPC (little endian mode)

[Muhamad Ikhwan Ismail]

 
Hi Timmy,
 
If you read my prev post, you would know why the padding is useless to me.
 
To Simon,
 
Understandable. Well if someone has the same problem, and checks this thread I guess he can always just bring it back up.
PowerPC is more robust in big endian mode, it even corrects the misalignment in big endian mode internallly (hardware). Why and how
to be honest I dont know (barely had any training on PowerPC, learned all through books.)
There are certain PowerPC assembler intructions that cause problems in little endian mode, I dont remember them by hard, need
to check the book.
 
Though you are correct about my method of correcting the problem would make lwip slower :
 
1. My driver didnt have to copy the received buffer at all. So I spare a lot there.
2. Fixing alignment in little endian mode is a very2 long process/routine.
3. And I dont have to copy the header everytime. E.g in TCP I only had to copy the header once for the multiple header processing.
 
So I hope this brings the end to the thread, at least till someone might need something out of it. I am thankful that so many people
had tried to help.
 
Greetings,
Ikhwan     

---

> Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 22:28:38 +0200
> From: address@hidden
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [lwip-users] Misalignment problems on PowerPC (little endian mode)
>
>
> >> I have the source which can be compiled if the option
> >> LWIP_MISALIGNMENT is set to 1. If anyone interested and have the same
> >> problem, I am more than willing to share and help. If you guys want
> >> to incorporate it to lwip as alternative solution to structure
> >> packing I am glad I can help. This lowers the stack performance a bit
> >> though.
> >
> >
> > Not to offend you, but personally, I see this as a bug in the compiler
> > you are using and we don't support broken compilers: structure packing
> > _is_ a must for lwIP!
> >
> > Hope you are still having fun with lwIP!
> >
> > Simon
> >
> Actually, no. Structure packing is not necessarily a must for lwip.
> In many cases lwip should work just fine without structure packing. I
> know that Texas Instruments DSP compilers will work with lwip without
> structure packing.
> Patches made to lwip several years ago ensured that if ETH_PAD_SIZE is
> set to 2, then no variable will ever be unaligned. This solves most of
> the problems which would otherwise require structure packing.
>
> There are two things a compiler may do which will still mess up the lwip
> structs:
> 1: Some compilers pad the size of all structs so that the size of a
> struct becomes a multiple of 4.
> 2: Some comiplers put all structs on an address boundary of 4,
> regardless of the actual boundary requirements of the members of the struct.
> Compilers which does any of the above would still require packed
> structs. Compilers which does neither of the above should work without
> packed structs, if ETH_PAD_SIZE is set to 2.
>
> Regards,
> Timmy Brolin
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> lwip-users mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lwip-users

---

Make every e-mail and IM count. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft.