From owner-freebsd-alpha Sat Apr 17 16:40:33 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from smtp04.primenet.com (smtp04.primenet.com [206.165.6.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 29DA114EE9 for ; Sat, 17 Apr 1999 16:40:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert@usr08.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp04.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id SAA06012; Sat, 17 Apr 1999 18:03:14 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr08.primenet.com(206.165.6.208) via SMTP by smtp04.primenet.com, id smtpd005993; Sat Apr 17 18:03:05 1999 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr08.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA23661; Sat, 17 Apr 1999 16:37:52 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199904172337.QAA23661@usr08.primenet.com> Subject: Re: egcs ready for alpha? To: dfr@nlsystems.com (Doug Rabson) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 23:37:52 +0000 (GMT) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, obrien@NUXI.com, paul@originative.co.uk, gallatin@cs.duke.edu, mjacob@feral.com, mike@smith.net.au, alpha@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Doug Rabson" at Apr 18, 99 00:06:11 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > Unfortuantely, a recent commit > > put a fault handler in that does fixups on unaligned accesses, and the > > damn this is defaulted to "on", which does a fat lot of good for getting > > these problems *resolved* instead of *masked*. > > Terry, get your facts right. FreeBSD/alpha has always had an unaligned > fault handler (which came from NetBSD verbatim). The recent commit was a > sysctl variable to turn the fault handler *off*. Doug, the commit originally defaulted the vaule to "off", but was "corrected" to default it to "on", which is never going to identify the problems adequately. FreeBSD has historically done things like defaulting TCP/IP extensions to on, and unmapping page zero, even though this has caused broken code to explode. Then the broken code, including the firmware in Livingston Portmasters, gets fixed, and the world is a better place for the default that is correct, but results in exploding code. I believe the original commit of this sysctl, which defaulted the value to "off" to be *correct*, if inconvenient for people who would rather dig a new pot-hole than spend time filling an old one in. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message