.align behavior in gas

[Ken Raeburn]

   Date: Tue, 25 Apr 95 17:16:18 MDT
   From: Bryan Ford <baford@schirf.cs.utah.edu>

   In recent gas snapshots, it seems that for some i386 targets
   (e.g. i386-mach, i386-gnu), gas interprets the .align directive
   as a number of bytes; whereas for other targets (e.g. i386-linux)
   it is interpreted as log2(nbytes).  Has this always been the case?

Yup.

   Are there any other directives that perform the same function but
   have a consistent behavior?  (I looked at gas/read.c, but couldn't

Not yet...

   find anything.)  If not, it would be very useful to have a new directive
   called, say, '.balign' that always takes a number of bytes, and/or a new
   directive called something like '.p2align' that always takes a power of
   two.  (I don't care what it is, as long as it's consistent!)   This
   should be trivial to do; just a matter of adding a new line or two
   to read.c, right?

Plus the update to the documentation...