#6810 ARM: Various Crashes due to buggy ARM ASM optimizations

[Markus Koschany]

Hello,

I am forwarding Debian bug report https://bugs.debian.org/779029.

It was reported that games like Beneath a Steel Sky and Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis crash with a segfault when running Debian's ScummVM package on ARM devices. It was further claimed that the ARM asm optimizations caused these issues. The bug reporter also submitted a patch which is supposed to fix the issue.

Unfortunately I do neither possess any ARM hardware to verify this bug report nor am I able to confirm whether the patch acually works. Is this a known issue? What do you think about the patch and what are your recommendations?

Regards,

Markus

[digitall]

The attached patch should work. It modifies the configuration script to cleanly disable all ASM optimizations for ARM targets by commenting out the various defines.

[digitall]

With the ARM ASM versions disabled, the code will use the normal C equivalents will likely be slower, but more reliable.

I would suggest merging this patch for ARM HF targets i.e. RPi etc. The team should probably look at making the ARM ASM disabled by default and only enabled for specific older ARM targets where it is absolutely necessary.

[digitall]

fuzzie: Any POV on this?

[Johannes Schickel]

Hmmm. I rememeber reading about something similar in the past. Wasn't there an issue with our hand crafted ASM routines and ARM targets which used some specific Thumb instruction set or something like that?

[Willem Jan Palenstijn]

Yes, but I don't think we ever got to the bottom of that.

[digitall]

Three open bugs are likely part of the same issue:
https://sourceforge.net/p/scummvm/bugs/6316/
https://sourceforge.net/p/scummvm/bugs/6132/
https://sourceforge.net/p/scummvm/bugs/5932/

It would be nice if we could get https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/348 merged to start with...

This was last discussed in http://logs.scummvm.org/log.php?log=scummvm.log.07May2013&format=html