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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T08:47:07+00:00

Is it somehow possible to catch data-alignment faults even on i386? Maybe by setting

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Is it somehow possible to catch data-alignment faults even on i386? Maybe by setting a i386 specific machine register or something like that.

On Solaris-Sparc I am receiving a SIGBUS in this case, but on i386 everything is fine.

Environment:

  • 32-bit application
  • Ubuntu Karmic
  • gcc/g++ v4.4.1

EDIT:
Here is why I am asking this:

  • our application crashes on Sol-Sparc with SIGBUS. For the purpose of debugging I would try to get a similar behavior on our i386 platform.
  • our Sol-sparc machine is very slow, so compiling and debugging takes a lot of time there. And our i386 machine is unbelievable fast (8 cores, 32G memory).
  • Even on i386 platforms there is a cost of performance on data-alignment faults. And therefore I would like to fix data-alignment faults wherever possible.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To expand on Vokuhila-Oliba’s answer looking at the “SOF Mis-aligned pointers on x86.” thread it seems that gcc can generate code with mis-aligned memory access. AFAIK you don’t have any control over this.

    Enabling alignment checks on gcc compiled code would be a bad idea. You risk getting SIGBUS errors for good C code.

    ReEdited: Sorry about that

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