> I am slightly confused about the BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT docs which state: > "Biggest alignment that any data type can require on this machine, in bits. > Note that this is not the biggest alignment that is supported, just the > biggest alignment that, when violated, may cause a fault." > > What kind of fault would this be?
Unaligned memory access fault. > I am tempted to set BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT to 8 so I can force GCC to just align > the data at any byte boundary. Would this be a fair use of > BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT? Yes, you may set BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT to 8 if unaligned memory accesses can never generate a fault on the architecture. But, in practice, you might want to take into account performance considerations. -- Eric Botcazou
