Alignment issues
Problems caused by accessing memory at addresses that violate alignment requirements, which can trigger faults on some architectures.
Definition
Alignment issues happen when code accesses memory at an address that violates alignment requirements for a given type or instruction.
Some CPU architectures tolerate misaligned access with a performance penalty.
Others raise a fault, which can show up as a crash such as SIGBUS.
Why you might encounter it
Alignment issues are more common in:
- native code
- unsafe code paths in runtimes
- memory-mapped I/O and low-level binary parsing