A whole other approach to alignment would be to strategically lengthen earlier instructions so that the designed alignment is achieved. This avoids adding any executed nops.
It's not as hard as it sounds: there is lots of redundancy in the x86 encoding, so you can often add REX prefixes, make offsets longer or add an offset where it doesn't exist, etc, etc.
It's not as hard as it sounds: there is lots of redundancy in the x86 encoding, so you can often add REX prefixes, make offsets longer or add an offset where it doesn't exist, etc, etc.