1 files changed, 29 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt b/Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt
index b0472ac5226a..f866c72291bf 100644
--- a/Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt
+++ b/Documentation/unaligned-memory-access.txt
@@ -218,9 +218,35 @@ If use of such macros is not convenient, another option is to use memcpy(),
 where the source or destination (or both) are of type u8* or unsigned char*.
 Due to the byte-wise nature of this operation, unaligned accesses are avoided.
 
+
+Alignment vs. Networking
+========================
+
+On architectures that require aligned loads, networking requires that the IP
+header is aligned on a four-byte boundary to optimise the IP stack. For
+regular ethernet hardware, the constant NET_IP_ALIGN is used. On most
+architectures this constant has the value 2 because the normal ethernet
+header is 14 bytes long, so in order to get proper alignment one needs to
+DMA to an address which can be expressed as 4*n + 2. One notable exception
+here is powerpc which defines NET_IP_ALIGN to 0 because DMA to unaligned
+addresses can be very expensive and dwarf the cost of unaligned loads.
+
+For some ethernet hardware that cannot DMA to unaligned addresses like
+4*n+2 or non-ethernet hardware, this can be a problem, and it is then
+required to copy the incoming frame into an aligned buffer. Because this is
+unnecessary on architectures that can do unaligned accesses, the code can be
+made dependent on CONFIG_HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS like so:
+
+#ifdef CONFIG_HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS
+        skb = original skb
+#else
+        skb = copy skb
+#endif
+
 --
-Author: Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>
+Authors: Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>,
+         Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
 With help from: Alan Cox, Avuton Olrich, Heikki Orsila, Jan Engelhardt,
-Johannes Berg, Kyle McMartin, Kyle Moffett, Randy Dunlap, Robert Hancock,
-Uli Kunitz, Vadim Lobanov
+Kyle McMartin, Kyle Moffett, Randy Dunlap, Robert Hancock, Uli Kunitz,
+Vadim Lobanov