Re: Tuple and changes for m68k with -malign-int

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

On Mon, 2023-08-28 at 12:11 +0000, Richard wrote:
> 
> On August 28, 2023 10:57:25 AM UTC, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> 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 perhap
> 1k or more and thus "unnatural" alignment might actually help performance because more
> fits into that one data burst.

This is a very academic discussion really and doesn't really solve the problem we're
seeing. We're here to solve a technical problem, not to discuss whether something is
according to the C standard.

Upstream projects decide on their own what maintenance burden they're willing to accept
and which not. If they don't think it's reasonable to accommodate for the specific m68k
alignment requirements, the burden to keep these packages working are on the distribution
maintainers meaning that I will have to continue spending time unbreaking packages like
OpenJDK in Debian which I prefer not having to in the future.

Adrian

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