[Ffmpeg-devel] sse sigsegv and libavcodec/wmadec.c

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 04:08:34PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > Hi, do you have any good suggestion how this can be fixed without fixing 
> > the compiler. This affects all codecs that needs aligned float buffers 
> > when using sse on windows (and other platforms). We could try to 
> > manually align the contexts (hacky but could work) or should we disable 
> > sse on platforms with broken compilers ?
> 
> why exactly does gcc on windows fail to provide the specified alignment while
> it works on linux? are all gcc versions affected?
> if its just gcc 3 then id say drop official gcc 3 support for windows

It's actually a gcc bug and it affects all systems except ones which
implement nonstandard GNU abi semantics, i.e. glibc. The problem is
that gcc makes no effort to actually align the stack but assumes that
it's aligned to begin with and that all function calls will keep it
aligned. This requires both the libc startup code (crt0.o or whatever)
to align the stack, and for all code to be compiled with a compiler
that wastes stack space and instructions to keep the stack aligned.

The only correct implementation is for the compiler to make no
assumption about stack alignment (beyond the mandatory word alignment
that's existed in the i386 abi ever since the beginning) and always
align the stack itself in the case where there are automatic variables
needing more stringent alignment than the default. Anything else will
break when linked with code from different compilers, startup code
from non-glibc-compliant systems, asm, etc.

If gcc devs refuse to fix their broken shit, I only see two possible
solutions:

1. disable sse
2. work around it by writing our own crap to align it...

Rich