As usual, I am replying to my own question. Maybe I was asking to soon
... :-)
I found some drivers offer an copy-only-tiny-buffer which will copy
small packets (for what purpose?). Apparently after the copying the
misalignment disappears. So MIPS, you just set a high copy_break_size
so that a copying always happens.
In fact this is what is done for other non-x86 architectures in tulip
drivers.
Jun
Jun Sun wrote:
>
> I was trying to run some PCI ether drivers and always got bus error, at
> least when I use ipconfig bootp code.
>
> However, the problem seems to be generic.
>
> Ethernet device writes a whole packet in the memory. Driver and network
> stack code often directly dereference a pointer in to the packet.
> However, the ether header is 14 byte long. If you align packet from the
> beginning, then IP header will be off-aligned.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> If this is a valid problem, I think the long term solution should be in
> network code, which should not assume they can dereference on an
> unaligned address.
>
> For short-term solutions, we can have trap handler that supports the
> unaligned read/write. Does anybody know if there is such a trap handler
> for MIPS?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jun
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