Clang warnings in itemrepository.h: cast from 'char *' to ... increases required alignment

[Steffen Ohrendorf]

Am Sonntag, 4. August 2013, 01:40:19 schrieb Milian Wolff:
> Still, isn't the issue that clang warns us about here relevant? Sure, we
> don't run on ARM hardware anyways, but besides that? Should one fix
> anything here?

Aligned memory improves memory access speed as the memory controller doesn't 
need to hazzle with 4-byte (on x86) or even 8-byte (x64) chunks that often. 
Additionally, I think most CPUs/on-chip-caches have optimizations for aligned 
memory, and even the run-time has such optimizations which might not trigger 
on non-aligned memory, and chances are there that some implementations do not 
check for non-aligned pointers.

A solution would be to do a memcpy at load time and let the memory manager do 
a proper alignment. From your statement of a 1-to-1-memdump, this would only 
affect the loading code, not the code involved in saving the data.

Cheers,
Steffen