The Importance of Data Alignment
In this section, we leave the discussion of a process’ virtual address space and discuss the important topic of data alignment. Data alignment is not so much a part of the operating system’s memory architecture as it is a part of the CPU’s architecture.
CPUs operate most efficiently when they access properly aligned data. Data is aligned when the memory address of the data modulo of the data’s size is 0. For example, a WORD value should always start on an address that is evenly divided by 2, a DWORD value should always start on an address that is evenly divided by 4, and so on. When the CPU attempts to read a data value that is not properly aligned, the CPU will do one of two things. It will either raise an exception ...
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