[U-Boot-Users] 32 bit alignment

[Marius Groeger]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Robert Schwebel wrote:

> The DHCP payload starts at the marked address, which is not 32 bit
> aligned. Now I want to access the 32 bit value at the marked address and
> the following one by using a pointer (u32*)bp which points to the marked
> address. The result is that I get the value from the address _before_
> the marked address (which belongs to the same 32 bit aligned dword).
> This makes the whole network code break which assumes that it can lay
> arbitrary data structures over the piece of memory.

This is standard behaviour on ARMs, if the alignment exception is
configured to be ignored. The EA is internally simply anded with ~3.
There are 2 ways to handle this:

1) Implement an alignment exception handler (have fun)
2) Don't access unaligned data. Use byte accesses instead.

Regards,
Marius

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Marius Groeger           SYSGO Real-Time Solutions AG       mgroeger at sysgo.de
Software Engineering     Embedded and Real-Time Software    www.sysgo.de
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