Andi Kleen [off-list ref] wrote:

Why does it break them? It should just make them a little slower.

Not all CPUs deliver recoverable misalignment exceptions.  This is probably
particularly true of NOMMU-mode archs where the CPU designed may have taken
the view that if a data exception is delivered, then the whole system is kaput
anyway and must be restarted.

The network code requires unaligned accesses to work anyways so if your
architecture doesn't support them it is already remotely crashable.

I thought we'd fixed all that.

David