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authorJohannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>2008-07-25 01:45:33 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2008-07-25 10:53:27 -0700
commit58340a07c194e0aed7bc58b61ff24330bb2a409f (patch)
tree907a53c71b3092e3a3a95c6641d4839e20214efd /Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt
parente0ce0da9fefcc723dc006c35a7f91a32750abd40 (diff)
introduce HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS Kconfig symbol
In many cases, especially in networking, it can be beneficial to know at compile time whether the architecture can do unaligned accesses efficiently. This patch introduces a new Kconfig symbol HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS for that purpose and adds it to the powerpc and x86 architectures. Also add some documentation about alignment and networking, and especially one intended use of this symbol. Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net> Acked-by: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org> Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> [x86 architecture part] Cc: <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt32
1 files changed, 29 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt b/Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt
index b0472ac5226..f866c72291b 100644
--- a/Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt
+++ b/Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt
@@ -218,9 +218,35 @@ If use of such macros is not convenient, another option is to use memcpy(),
where the source or destination (or both) are of type u8* or unsigned char*.
Due to the byte-wise nature of this operation, unaligned accesses are avoided.
+
+Alignment vs. Networking
+========================
+
+On architectures that require aligned loads, networking requires that the IP
+header is aligned on a four-byte boundary to optimise the IP stack. For
+regular ethernet hardware, the constant NET_IP_ALIGN is used. On most
+architectures this constant has the value 2 because the normal ethernet
+header is 14 bytes long, so in order to get proper alignment one needs to
+DMA to an address which can be expressed as 4*n + 2. One notable exception
+here is powerpc which defines NET_IP_ALIGN to 0 because DMA to unaligned
+addresses can be very expensive and dwarf the cost of unaligned loads.
+
+For some ethernet hardware that cannot DMA to unaligned addresses like
+4*n+2 or non-ethernet hardware, this can be a problem, and it is then
+required to copy the incoming frame into an aligned buffer. Because this is
+unnecessary on architectures that can do unaligned accesses, the code can be
+made dependent on CONFIG_HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS like so:
+
+#ifdef CONFIG_HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS
+ skb = original skb
+#else
+ skb = copy skb
+#endif
+
--
-Author: Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>
+Authors: Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>,
+ Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
With help from: Alan Cox, Avuton Olrich, Heikki Orsila, Jan Engelhardt,
-Johannes Berg, Kyle McMartin, Kyle Moffett, Randy Dunlap, Robert Hancock,
-Uli Kunitz, Vadim Lobanov
+Kyle McMartin, Kyle Moffett, Randy Dunlap, Robert Hancock, Uli Kunitz,
+Vadim Lobanov