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

The trickiest requirement is obviously the third one, since any malloc() / realloc() based solution is hostage to realloc() moving the block to a different alignment.

On Linux, you could use anonymous mappings created with mmap() instead of malloc(). Addresses returned by mmap() are by necessity page-aligned, and the mapping can be extended with mremap().