Re: bzip2 unaligned trap
On Thu, 25 Aug 2005, Uwe Schindler wrote:
This is a software problem that lies in the ALPHA RISC processor
architecture. The processor cannot access memory that is not
aligned at boundaries conforming to the datatype to be
read/written.
Urmm, don't you mean:
"It's a software problem which lies in the laxity of the x86
architecture"
x86 being one of the /few/ architectures which doesn't fault on
unaligned accesses. Though, even on x86 they still are /slower/ than
aligned accesses (the CPU is doing the fixups in hardware rather than
trapping).
SPARC definitely traps unaligned. PPC I /think/ does too.
Just Linux which generally tries to cover up for bad software.
because alpha is not the main platform and most developers do not
have such a processor.
Try PPC.
regards,
--
Paul Jakma paul@clubi.ie paul@jakma.org Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
"They're unfriendly, which is fortunate, really. They'd be difficult to like."
-- Avon
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