[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: [PATCH] Machine endian bytestream functions

[Måns Rullgård]

Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 05:39:15PM -0300, Ramiro Ribeiro Polla wrote:
>> I didn't know what that __packed__ was doing there. But now I checked 
>> with an arm compiler...
>
> I'm not familar with the discussion, but: __packed__ is not portable
> C. It's fine for conditionally-compiled code to use it, just like the
> inline asm, but the whole program should build on any standard C
> compiler as long as all arch-specific optimizations are disabled. This
> means that you cannot rely on attribute(__packed__) to do the
> unaligned reads/writes for you; you must use byte-by-byte code in the
> general case.

Yes, of course.  As I explained earlier, we can't check whether
unaligned accesses work.  This means we must have a fallback to
byte-by-byte reading.  In addition, we can implement either or both of
gcc attribute(packed) (or equivalent for other compilers) or a manual
list.  Letting the compiler choose is probably to be preferred since
it should be able to generate the most efficient code.  Reading four
bytes is not necessarily the fastest.  For the case that the compiler
doesn't have a notion of unaligned accesses we can either use a list
of architectures, or we can assume this is rare enough that we just
fall back to byte-reading.

-- 
M?ns Rullg?rd
mans at mansr.com