Question on Alignment requiremnet

[subin gangadharan]

Hi All,

I have some doubts on the alignment requirement.It would be really
helpful,if someone can shed some light on this.
Why there are so many different types of alignment like 4 byte, 8 byte,16
byte ?.My exact question is, in a 32 bit machine(I assume processor reads
data in 4 bytes),how 16 byte alignment makes different from 4 byte alignment
?.How this will influence the processor performance ?.

-
With Regards
Subin Gangadharan

Everything should be made as simple as possible,but not simpler.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/pipermail/kernelnewbies/attachments/20110806/c8eb226d/attachment.html