From: Qing Zhao <qing.z...@oracle.com> Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 10:37:15 -0500
> all the special handling on STRICT_ALIGNMENT or > SLOW_UNALIGNMENT_ACCESS in these codes have the following common > logic: > > if the memory access is known to be not-aligned well during > compilation time, if the targeted platform does NOT support faster > unaligned memory access, the compiler will try to make the memory > access aligned well. Otherwise, if the targeted platform supports > faster unaligned memory access, it will leave the compiler-time > known not-aligned memory access as it, later the hardware support > will kicked in for these unaligned memory access. > > this behavior is consistent with the high level definition of > STRICT_ALIGNMENT. That's exactly the problem. What you want with this M8 feature is simply to let the compiler know that if it is completely impossible to make some memory object aligned, then the cpu can handle this with special instructions. You still want the compiler to make the effort to align data when it can because the accesses will be faster than if it used the unaligned loads and stores. This is incredibly important for on-stack objects.
