The only guidance the AHCI specification gives on memory access is:
"Register accesses shall have a maximum size of 64-bits; 64-bit access
must not cross an 8-byte alignment boundary."
I interpret this to mean that aligned or unaligned 1, 2 and 4 byte
accesses should work, as well as aligned 8 byte accesses.
In practice, a real Q35/ICH9 responds to 1, 2, 4 and 8 byte reads
regardless of alignment. Windows 7 can be observed making 1 byte
reads to the middle of 32 bit registers to fetch error codes.
Introduce a wrapper to support unaligned accesses to AHCI.
This wrapper will support aligned 8 byte reads, but will make
no effort to support unaligned 8 byte reads, which although they
will work on real hardware, are not guaranteed to work and do
not appear to be used by either Windows or Linux.
Signed-off-by: John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-id: 1434470575-21625-2-git-send-email-jsnow@redhat.com