On Misaligned Memory Accesses

Darryl Gove, June 1, 2006

The UltraSPARC processor does not handle misaligned memory operations (loads and stores) in hardware. An application can be compiled to either crash on a misaligned memory accesses, or trap to software to correct the alignment. A further option is that an application can be compiled to assume that data is always misaligned, and use multiple loads or stores for each memory operation.