Re: Smashing the Stack?

[strange () nsk yi org]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 01:34:38PM -0400, Eric Thomas wrote:
> I went through this same mystery a few months ago.  Apparently GCC pads
> the generated assembly for better memory alignment, which makes certain
> operations faster.  

And in some archs, legal. Non-align memory access is illegal in some archs,
and non-existant in others (MIPS ignores the last 2/4(?) bits, anyway).

In those cases the OS or the compiler has to access the two words were the
data is stored. That's not a minor speed penalty...

Anyway, whoever's playing with gcc generated assembly code should compile
the program explicity without optimizations (-O0) or maybe with
optimizations for size (-Os) (not sure about data size reduction).

Regards,
Luciano Rocha