AFAIK, in general, it's not possible; it's a hardware limitation of the CPU. Some architectures like the x86 do allow unaligned atomic accesses, but in a very h

AFAIK, in general, it's not possible; it's a hardware limitation of the CPU. Some architectures like the x86 do allow unaligned atomic accesses, but in a very heavy handed way (doing an unaligned atomic access on the x86 locks the whole bus, stalling all processor cores at the same time). The Linux kernel recently gained the ability to detect this situation and, depending on configuration by the administrator, it could either log a kernel warning or kill the offending process. Some discussion about this on LWN found on a quick web search: https://lwn.net/Articles/790464/ https://lwn.net/Articles/790464/ https://lwn.net/Articles/806466/ https://lwn.net/Articles/806466/ https://lwn.net/Articles/911219/ https://lwn.net/Articles/911219/