On May 12, 2010, at 10:01 AM, Jesus Cea wrote:
On 12/05/10 15:39, James Y Knight wrote:
While assuming the stack is 16byte aligned is undeniably an ABI-violation in GCC, at this point, it's surely simpler to just go along: the new unofficial ABI for x86 is that the stack must always be left in 16-byte alignment...
You can not rule out other software embedding python inside, or callbacks from foreign code. For instance, Berkeley DB library can do callbacks to Python code.
So? When calling callback functions, the Berkeley DB library won't un-16byte-align the stack, will it? (Assuming it's been compiled with gcc in the last 10 years)
Not all the universe is GCC based. For instance, Solaris system libraries are not compiled using GCC. The world is bigger that Linux/ GCC.
If the Solaris compilers don't use 16byte-aligned stackframes, and GCC on Solaris/x86 also assumes 16byte-aligned stacks, I guess GCC on Solaris/x86 is pretty broken indeed. But for Linux/x86, stacks have been de-facto 16byte aligned for so long, you can *almost* excuse the ABI violation as unimportant. But anyways, psyco should keep the stackframes 16byte aligned regardless, for performance reasons: even when accessing datatypes for which unaligned access doesn't crash, it's faster when it's aligned. James