In other words: you have probably in your code a class that has as a member a vectorizable fixed-size Eigen object, and you then dynamically allocated an object of that class.
A Eigen::Vector2d consists of 2 doubles, which is 128 bits. Which is exactly the size of a SSE packet, which makes it possible to use SSE for all sorts of operations on this vector. But SSE instructions (at least the ones that Eigen uses, which are the fast ones) require 128-bit alignment. Otherwise you get a segmentation fault.
For this reason, Eigen takes care by itself to require 128-bit alignment for Eigen::Vector2d, by doing two things:
\li Eigen requires 128-bit alignment for the Eigen::Vector2d's array (of 2 doubles). With GCC, this is done with a __attribute__ ((aligned(16))).
\li Eigen overloads the "operator new" of Eigen::Vector2d so it will always return 128-bit aligned pointers.
Thus, normally, you don't have to worry about anything, Eigen handles alignment for you...
... except in one case. When you have a class Foo like above, and you dynamically allocate a new Foo as above, then, since Foo doesn't have aligned "operator new", the returned pointer foo is not necessarily 128-bit aligned.
The alignment attribute of the member v is then relative to the start of the class, foo. If the foo pointer wasn't aligned, then foo->v won't be aligned either!
No, that's not needed. Since Eigen takes care of declaring 128-bit alignment, all members that need it are automatically 128-bit aligned relatively to the class. So when you have code like
\section dynamicsize What about dynamic-size matrices and vectors?
Dynamic-size matrices and vectors, such as Eigen::VectorXd, allocate dynamically their own array of coefficients, so they take care of requiring absolute alignment automatically. So they don't cause this bug. The bug discussed here is only with fixed-size matrices and vectors.
No, it's not our bug. It's more like an inherent problem of the C++ language -- though it must be said that any other existing language probably has the same problem. The problem is that there is no way that you can specify an aligned "operator new" that would propagate to classes having you as member data.