> No, it will use ldrh/strh if you it to use a CPU model supports them.  
> However, we support several ARM systems without half-word load/store.  You 
> can verify this yourself by looking in arm.md; all of the split patterns that 
> use rotated loads have:
> 
>   "TARGET_ARM && (!arm_arch4)"
> 
> or:
> 
>           else if (!arm_arch4)
> 

The compiler is configured with TARGET_MMU_TRAPS now (and has been since 
we switched to ELF), so even if ldrh/strh aren't available it won't use 
unaligned word accesses.

R.