Re: [PATCH v5] eal: fix unaligned loads/stores in rte_memcpy_generic

[Luc Pelletier <lucp.at.work@gmail.com>]

> > Calls to rte_memcpy_generic could result in unaligned loads/stores for
> > 1 < n < 16. This is undefined behavior according to the C standard,
> > and it gets flagged by the clang undefined behavior sanitizer.
> >
> > rte_memcpy_generic is called with unaligned src and dst addresses.
> > When 1 < n < 16, the code would cast both src and dst to a qword,
> > dword or word pointer, without verifying the alignment of src/dst. The
> > code was changed to use a packed structure to perform the unaligned
> > load/store operations. This results in unaligned load/store operations
> > to be C standards-compliant.
>
> Still not sure we need to fix that:
> This is x86 specific code-path, and as I remember on x86 there are no
> penalties for unaligned access to 2/4/8 byte values.
> Though I like introduction of rte_mov15_or_less() function -t helps
> with code dedup.

Thanks for your input Konstantin. Much appreciated. Just to make sure
I understand, can you please confirm that we do not want to fix the
fact that unaligned access in C is undefined behaviour? I understand
that X86 allows unaligned accesses but since this isn't assembly code,
we have to go by what the C standard allows.

Also, do you have any opinion on the strict aliasing violation (as was
pointed out by Georg)? I suggested adding __may_alias__ thinking it
would likely fix the issue, but I'd really like to get confirmation
from someone who has better knowledge of how the attribute works
exactly.

Thanks