http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=57748
--- Comment #10 from Martin Jambor <jamborm at gcc dot gnu.org> --- The problem is that the type of the record that contains the scalar data we are accessing has non-BLK mode despite that we are not accessing a part of it. This is because it has a zero sized trailing array: typedef struct S { V a; V b[0]; } P __attribute__((aligned (1))); in the x86_64-linux example from comment #9, and struct resolved_chain { u64 nr; struct resolved_ip ips[0]; }; in the original testcase. Because it has non-BLK mode, it passes the condition in expand-assignment that is there to handle accesses to small, scalar-sized structures (or even arrays) which should be written to memory through movmisalign_optab. E.g. to access an element of a vector. However, in these testcases, the structure we are writing to is bigger than a scalar. I wonder why structures with trailing zero-sized arrays have non-BLK mode. I think that is the root of the problem, actually.