Without this option, gcc may emit code accessing unaligned memory. This,
and the fact that SCTRL.A (System Control Register - Alignment Check) is
set to 1 in Minix causes data aborts when such code is encountered.
This was the cause of #104. The `minix-service' executable caused
unaligned memory accesses calling into getpwnam(). These then trigger
data abort exceptions. On ARM, these were previously forwarded to `vm'
as pagefaults. However, `vm' did not properly handle them, but instead
allocated one page for the faulting address (over and over again) and
then resumed the process at the faulting instruction (over and over
again). This behavior masked the whole story as an OOM.
Below the assembly version getpwent.c in which unaligned memory
accesses are even highlighted...