Well, there's two distinct issues here. There's the need for a
single-instruction 5 byte nop, and the need for efficient nops. It so
happens in this case that they're the same thing. But in general, the
generic nop interface is intended to return the most efficient nop, not
an atomic nop (or with any other properties). To handle it generically,
we'd either need to redefine the meaning of the existing nop-padding
interface, or add an "atomic nop" interface.
J
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