> Andrew, for my understanding: What do you think is wrong with the > alignment requirement? It was introduced because we do a 32 bit access > to the start address of the array and want to avoid an unaligned access. Hi Heiner Because you are doing pointer aliasing, the compiler will by default generate bad code, doing unaligned access. Adding the attribute works around this. But it is just a work around. Since this is very slow path code, i would just avoid the pointer aliasing, write a bit more C code as Thierry suggested, and the optimiser will probably figure out what is going on and produce reasonable code. Also, in general, by avoiding pointer aliasing, you allow static code checkers to work better. They are more likely to discover buffer overruns, etc. Andrew