How to catch data-alignment faults on x86 (aka SIGBUS on Sparc)

Question

Is it somehow possible to catch data-alignment faults even on i386? Maybe by setting a i386 specific machine register or something like that.

On Solaris-Sparc I am r

Answer 1

To expand on Vokuhila-Oliba's answer looking at the "SOF Mis-aligned pointers on x86." thread it seems that gcc can generate code with mis-aligned memory access. AFAIK you don't have any control over this.

Enabling alignment checks on gcc compiled code would be a bad idea. You risk getting SIGBUS errors for good C code.

ReEdited: Sorry about that