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I think I understand memory alignment, but what confuses me is that the address of a pointer on some systems is going to be in virtual memory, right? So most of the checking/ensuring of alignment I have seen seem to just use the pointer address. Is it not possible that the physical memory address will not be aligned? Isn’t that problematic for things like SSE?
The physical address will be aligned because virtual memory only maps aligned pages to physical memory (and the pages are typically 4KB).
So unless you need alignment > page size, the physical memory will be aligned as per your requirements.
In the specific case of SSE, everything works fine because you only need 16 byte alignment.