FreeTDS Development Group

[James Cameron <james.cameron AT compaq.com>]

Brian Bruns wrote:
> There is a change that has to be made to run on alpha (by the way, from
> my recollection alpha does not bus error on unaligned access but it is
> simply slower than aligned access) [...]

Since my company produced the Alpha I can tell you what actually happens
... the unaligned access is trapped, causes execution of trap code that
will look at the instruction that failed, create a set of instructions
on the fly that will do the same thing, and use them instead.  ;-)

Using the uac command, the user can change this to a fatal exception. 
This is usually done in coverage testing to find things that deserve
being realigned for speed reasons.

-- 
James Cameron                                      (cameron AT stl.dec.com)

Not the Director of Titanic, but he had his name before I did.