This come up during review of bitops instrumentation: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/kasan-dev/g8BcLLjpgoA/qxaxdveBBQAJ It would be useful to check that addresses passed to atomicops/bitops are properly aligned, because the future hardware may trap on unaligned accesses, there is significant performance penalty for accesses splitting cache lines and it may cause problems with bit/little-endiness. Bitops should be aligned to long: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/kasan-dev/g8BcLLjpgoA/Fr5uTbiEBQAJ Documentation/core-api/atomic_ops.rst Native atomic bit operations are defined to operate on objects aligned to the size of an "unsigned long" C data type, and are least of that size. The endianness of the bits within each "unsigned long" are the native endianness of the cpu. This should be done as a separate config (not KASAN) as not related to KASAN per se. But the existing {atomicops,bitops}-instrumented.h hooks provide handy foundation for such checks.