Re: [linuxsh-dev] bad alignment fixup

[Mitch D. <md...@po...>]

Philipp Rumpf wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Nov 07, 2000 at 03:15:20PM +0100, Jesper Skov wrote:
> > The below patch is based on an old patch from Philipp Rumpf. It allows
> > the kernel to make unaligned access if it should happen to think that
> > it a good thing to do.
> 
> I think the only valid reason for unaligned accesses is using weird
> network protocols.  Unless there really are people out there relying
> on it I'd advise against integrating it in the standard kernel
> (there might be security issues with put/get_user).

Hello Jesper and Phillip,

I'd like to thank you for doing this work for unaligned accesses.

Many moons ago I used a Unix that supported unaligned accesses so that
binaries from a previous version of the operating system would run.
While the programs ran successfully, the alignment faults caused
less than stellar performance.  However if all you've got is binaries,
I guess it's the only choice.

With the general prevalence of source code for Linux programs, and
no existing body of LinuxSH programs with unaligned access problems,
I would suggest that a good reason not to include the patch would be
so that we don't ever have buggy programs running silently but slowly.

Regards,

Mitch.