Hi,

> Not all that recently but yes, I gather this is what has happened.  (The ADS 
> now uses 8-bit alignment whereas the old SDT used 32-bit.)  I think the small 
> performance gain turned out not to be worth the portability hassles; I also 
> have a feeling some embedded users were upset at the waste of memory.

Because of entering late in this discussion, I'm not sure that this is
really the same change that we have used in NetBSD/arm32 from the start,
however, please note that the ABI used in that port does of course align
values on suitable boundaries, i.e. shorts to 16-bit and ints/longs etc.
on 32-bit boundaries.  The only difference to the original ARM ABI is
that with that structures are required to be aligned on 32-bit boundaries
_independent_ of their contents, while we wouldn't require any specific
alignment of e.g. a structure containing only characters.

Any performance gain of the original ARM ABI I can think of must be
a side effect suach as better alignment to cache line boundaries or even
page boundaries.

Hope to clarify things a bit (or stir up more mud... :-)).

Ciao,
Wolfgang
-- 
ws@TooLs.DE     Wolfgang Solfrank, TooLs GmbH 	+49-228-985800