http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=45722
--- Comment #32 from Richard Guenther <rguenth at gcc dot gnu.org> 2010-11-12 13:14:06 UTC --- In the long term (read: 4.7) I like to resurrect the lowering of bitfield accesses from the (old) mem-ref branch and eventually treat unaligned loads on strict-align targets as bitfield accesses and thus lower them as well (somewhen after final inlining but for example before loop optimizations).