[PATCH] Clean up ARM compressed loader

Hector Martin hector at marcansoft.com
Wed Feb 24 10:20:18 EST 2010


Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> It does work with the previous version of the decompressor.

Sure, at this point in time. The broken code is still the loader, not
the new decompressor. If a GCC update had been the culprit, it wouldn't
be GCC's fault. The fact remains that the behavior is undefined and
(with current GCC versions) requires carefully crafting the resulting C
code in order to get reasonable behavior. I don't think you can
reasonably require that a generic descompressor be maintained by others
with care for compatibility with this hack; someone would have to police
changes for potential issues, and you still have a decent chance of
getting breakage if GCC decides to change its behavior some day. I'd say
fixing the loader to not require this undefined behavior is a
considerably better long-term solution.

> I noticed that you did not reply to my previous email on this subject,
> are you intentionally ignoring my responses?

You had a valid point which I hadn't considered (running ROM images from
RAM), so I figured I'd give addressing that a shot before going into
discussion mode.

-- 
Hector Martin (hector at marcansoft.com)
Public Key: http://www.marcansoft.com/marcan.asc




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