Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha@arm.com> wrote:

> nick@flirble.org said:
> > Is this of direct use to BSD?
> 
> I wrote a utility some time ago (which was posted on this list), which is 
> generally a better work-around than rogering the compiler.  My utility 
> identified just those problem instructions that lay on a page boundary and 
> moved them to a safe location in the binary image.  While it was 
> theoretically possible for this program's heuristics to make a mistake, 
> I've never known it to (however, I no-longer have a Rev-K, so I don't know 
> how much other people are using it).

I am using it, and because of the bug I can not use KDE, Netscape and a
lot of other programs. The main problem is that you program fixes only some
cases of the bug, and it can not fix bugs in shared libraries. And most of
the problems I have are in shared libraries. Your program is good, and
made it possible to use some programs I could not use before. But it is not
enough.

> A full "fix" to the compiler would require that you never allow the PC to 
> be loaded directly from memory (except via B or BL) -- this will make some 
> return instruction sequences really slow, and will also impact pointers to 
> functions and table-jumps.

OK, but those people who do not have a Strongarm rev. K do not need to use
the fix, they do not need to use the switch. From your point of view it
might seem ok without a compiler fix, but not from mine.
 
> Summary: I still don't think fixing the compiler is the correct way to 
> address this bug.

And I can not agree, because a compiler fix would save me the costs of
buying a new Strongarm. And as I said, people who do not need it should
simply not use the compiler swithes for it. Of course, a version of your
utility which can fix all cases of the bug and shared libraries too would
be better. But as it does not exist and you certainly do not want to
extend it because it has no real use for you ...

-- 
Peter Teichmann

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Email: teich-p@rcs.urz.tu-dresden.de  WWW: rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~teich-p