linux-kernel - Re: 3.1-rc6 boot problem reason searching

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Date:	Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:23:18 -0700
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Andrew Lutomirski <luto@....edu>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Cc:	werner <w.landgraf@...ru>
Subject: Re: 3.1-rc6 boot problem reason searching

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> It *used* to have an alignment of 8 back before your patch to make the
> pointers be relative due to the 64-bit pointers. But now all fields
> are 32-bit, and it could easily have a size of just 12 bytes, getting
> rid of the 'pad2' field, and getting rid of the '.balign 8's.

IOW, maybe the correct patch is just the attached one.

Werner, does this fix the boot for you? It gets rid of all the bogus
alignment stuff, it's all wrong anyway, the altinstructions section
entries are all 12 bytes long so it starts out sufficiently aligned,
and it *stays* aligned because if anybody ever adds a non-12-byte
entry that would be a huge bug regardless. So any extra alignment is
just likely to be buggy and hide much bigger issues.

This is COMPLETELY UNTESTED, just looking at the source.

                     Linus

View attachment "patch.diff" of type "text/x-patch" (2275 bytes)