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TI Home » TI E2E Community » Support Forums » Microcontrollers » Stellaris® ARM® Microcontrollers » Stellaris® ARM® LM3S Microcontrollers Forum » Fault ISR : Unaligned Access
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    Fault ISR : Unaligned Access

    This question is answered
    Vinoth Gunasekaran
    Posted by Vinoth Gunasekaran
    on Aug 02 2012 04:53 AM
    Prodigy60 points

    Hi,

    While using pointers and structures, some times i getting this Fault.

    When does this Fault occurs(Unaligned Access) ?

    Regards,

    Vinoth

    Fault ISR
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    • Kai Gossner
      Posted by Kai Gossner
      on Aug 02 2012 05:25 AM
      Intellectual830 points

      Hi Vinoth,

      unaligned access means, that the pointer you are dereferencing is pointing to a not-aligned adress.

      For best performance (to minimize the count of bus accesses) values should be aligned to their natural size, e.g. the pointer of a 16 bit value to 2-byte, 32 bit values to 4-bytes.

      Example:

      Assume there is a 32 bit value (0x12345678) in memory:

      address value
      0x00000010 0x78
      0x00000011 0x56
      0x00000012 0x34
      0x00000013 0x12

      The pointer 0x00000010 is pointing to an aligned adress, because (0x00000010 & 0x03) = 0.

      address value
      0x00000013 0x78
      0x00000014 0x56
      0x00000015 0x34
      0x00000016 0x12

      Now the 32 bit value is not aligned, because (0x00000013 & 0x03) != 0.

      Cortex M3/M4 cores are able to support unaligned memory accesses, while older ARM cores don't.

      Unaligned accesses should not be used in case speed is important (avoid using packed structs/arrays), but will save memory.

      The generation of this fault can be turned on or off (Feature of the Cortex core). By default it is disabled, so it is very likely that there is something in your code that enables these faults.

      The fault can be disabled in the Configuration Control Register.

      Best regards,

      Kai


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    • slandrum
      Posted by slandrum
      on Aug 02 2012 06:17 AM
      Mastermind9510 points

      The LDM, STM, LDRD and STRD instructions require aligned addresses, even on the Cortex-M3.  For some reason, the compiler may be wanting to generate these instructions - this suggests that you are probably trying to copy chunks of unaligned structures around or have unaligned 64 bit values in your structures.

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    • Vinoth Gunasekaran
      Posted by Vinoth Gunasekaran
      on Aug 02 2012 06:23 AM
      Prodigy60 points

      You are right, i am copying a chunk of data that belong to a structure through pointers. How could I solve this?

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    • slandrum
      Posted by slandrum
      on Aug 02 2012 06:31 AM
      Verified Answer
      Verified by Vinoth Gunasekaran
      Mastermind9510 points

      Generally memcpy is written to be safe to do memory moves regardless of alignment.  Try that.

      How are your structures getting unaligned?  This usually takes extra effort.

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    • Vinoth Gunasekaran
      Posted by Vinoth Gunasekaran
      on Aug 02 2012 23:59 PM
      Prodigy60 points

      Yes, It worked. Memcpy seems to be a better way to copy chunk of memory.

      Thanks..

      Vinoth

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