On August 28, 2023 10:57:25 AM UTC, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 2023-08-26 at 19:24 +0000, Richard wrote:
Not only mold but also most notably the following projects:
a linker that is broken by a slightly unusual alignment isn't exactly a
prime example.. if any project I would expect linkers and binary tools
to pay attention to portability.
Portable shouldn't mean having to accommodate for unreasonable design decisions
of other developers. It's perfectly fine to assume 32-bit natural alignment on
a 32-bit platform and I don't think it's fair to put the burden of adopting for
unusual design decisions on to upstream projects.
Assuming anything that is not declared by the c standard is not good imho. The C lang is well known for its pitfalls and the basic binary tools ought not to set bad precedents ignoring those.
It is also reasonable to assume that on modern hw cache is filled in blocks of perhaps 1k or more and thus "unnatural" alignment might actually help performance because more fits into that one data burst.
Thus.. is there any need to change the kernel ABI?
I don't think this mandates changes to the kernel ABI.
That would be really good, anything else could be handled by library versioning in a mostly backwards compatible way?
Richard
