RISC Processor Data Alignment

9/7/2007

Alignment of data is an important issue when porting or writing code on some target architectures, especially architectures other than x86.

Depending on the architecture, unaligned operations with primitive data types can cause poor application performance, or can cause your application to fault and terminate abnormally.

The following list provides links to information that can help you avoid such pitfalls.

Term Definition

About Data Alignment

Describes how data alignment issues impact device programming.

Avoiding Alignment Errors

Provides guidelines for keeping primitive types properly aligned.

Working with Packing Structures

Describes how structure packing interacts with alignment.

__unaligned keyword

Provides reference information about using the __unaligned modifier to deal with alignment issues.

See Also

Other Resources

Differences Between Desktop and Device Compilers