Subject: Re: Is anyone seeing alignment faults on -current?
To: Frank van der Linden <frank@wins.uva.nl>
From: Mark H. Levine <yba@polytronics.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 10/15/1997 00:22:39
   There have been reports of my NFS changes causing alignment faults on
   the Alpha and Sparc, probably because an off_t was fetched from
   an address aligned to 4 bytes, not 8.
   
   I checked in what I thought was a fix (making the changes I made in
   dirent handling was off_t aligned), but I did get one report still
   about alignment faults. However, the bug could not be reproduced
   again.

You  might  be  interested in anecdotal evidence of an older 1.2G
Alpha system -- we noticed  today  that  netboot  failed  with  a
system  whose name was "srdev3" but worked when we simply renamed
it "srd3".  The error reported by mountd was  "alignment  error",
and  the  client  machine  simply  reported NFS mount errors with
value -1 when  using  the  longer  name.   I'd  expect  that  the
alignment  errors  would  be  fixed  up, and mountd kept running,
however we were  amused  that  the  NFS  request  was  not  being
fulfilled,  and  that  of  all  things,  the problem followed the
length of the hostname.  Just in case you want  to  broaden  your
search.  I don't know that mountd has changed much of late.