Directives such as .long and .word do not magically cause the
assembler location counter to become aligned in gas. As a result,
using these directives in code sections can result in misaligned
data words when building a Thumb-2 kernel (CONFIG_THUMB2_KERNEL).
This is a Bad Thing, since the ABI permits the compiler to assume
that fundamental types of word size or above are word- aligned when
accessing them from C. If the data is not really word-aligned,
this can cause impaired performance and stray alignment faults in
some circumstances.
In general, the following rules should be applied when using data
word declaration directives inside code sections:
* .quad and .double:
.align 3
* .long, .word, .single, .float:
.align (or .align 2)
* .short:
No explicit alignment required, since Thumb-2
instructions are always 2 or 4 bytes in size.
immediately after an instruction.
Reviewed-by: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Martin <dave.martin@linaro.org>
Acked-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@arm.linux.org.uk>
Dave Martin