Aligned memory management?

Question

I have a few related questions about managing aligned memory blocks. Cross-platform answers would be ideal. However, as I\'m pretty sure a cross-platform solution does not

Answer 1

Starting a C11, you have void *aligned_alloc( size_t alignment, size_t size ); primitives, where the parameters are:

alignment - specifies the alignment. Must be a valid alignment supported by the implementation. size - number of bytes to allocate. An integral multiple of alignment

Return value

On success, returns the pointer to the beginning of newly allocated memory. The returned pointer must be deallocated with free() or realloc().

On failure, returns a null pointer.

Example:

#include 
#include 


    int main(void)
    {
        int *p1 = malloc(10*sizeof *p1);
        printf("default-aligned addr:   %p\n", (void*)p1);
        free(p1);

        int *p2 = aligned_alloc(1024, 1024*sizeof *p2);
        printf("1024-byte aligned addr: %p\n", (void*)p2);
        free(p2);
    }

Possible output:

default-aligned addr:   0x1e40c20
1024-byte aligned addr: 0x1e41000