Will process load into memory with 4 or 8 alignment rule

I just learnt about 4 or 8 memory alignment and came about this question.

Will Memory alignment happen in virtual memory space or absolute addresss?

I guess the answer is virtual memory space， and the os will load the process to the position that the absolute address ends with ‘0X00’ or ‘0X0’.

If not, please show me why. Thanks a lot. XD

Answer

Both virtual and actual addresses will be word-aligned to the CPU’s native word-size where appropriate(*). (The reason for that is that the virtual-to-physical mapping is done on a per-page basis, and the size of a memory page is always an even multiple of the CPU’s native word-size).

(*) the exception would be for items that are smaller than a word, and are packed together consecutively to save memory; e.g. many of the individual elements inside of char and uint_8 arrays will necessarily not be word-aligned.