MIPS section alignment of object file

["robert song" <robertsong.linux@gmail.com>]

Hello, everyone.
some sections like  .data are set to 16 bytes alignment  in the
binutils/gas/config/tc-mips.c as bellows.
          (void) bfd_set_section_alignment (stdoutput, text_section, 4);

But in other architectures like arm, .data section is aligned to 4
bytes alignment,
and  now I test the object file generated by gas, and found that the
size of .data section sometimes is a little bigger than the situation
of 4 bytes alignments because of the amount of padding.

There are some comments in the tc-mips.c as bellows:
         On a native system other than VxWorks, sections must be aligned
         to 16 byte boundaries.  When configured for an embedded ELF
         target, we don't bother.

I want to know whether some mips architecture requires that the
sections of elf object file specifies to be aligned to 16 bytes,  or
else 16-bytes alignment will get a good performance than other
alignments just like 4 bytes????

I recompiled  the binutils by changing the alignment to 4 bytes, and
compiled some
test files, and ran on my mips target(TX4937). There is no problem.

I am really puzzled and any help will be appreciated.

robertsong