title: alignment in user defined sections in gcc
body: <p>It seems that top level objects in gcc targeting x86 that are >= 32 bytes automatically get 32 byte alignment. This may be nice for performance, but I'm collecting an array of thingies from all my object files in a user-defined section, and the extra alignment gaps play havoc with this array. Is there any way to prevent this object alignment?</p>
  
  <p>To clarify, I have a low-aligned struct, and different object files define
  data in the form of an array of that struct in a user defined section, with
  the purpose to make one application wide array.
  As soon as one of those arrays is >= 32, the object alignment and with that the section alignment is pushed to 32 and when the linker concatenates the separate sections from the object files into the executable, it creates alignment fillers at the module boundaries in that section.</p>