GCC function padding value

Programmer Question

Whenever I compile C or C++ code with optimizations enable,d GCC aligns functions to a 16-byte boundary (on IA-32). If the function is shorter than 16 bytes, GCC pads it with some bytes, which don't seem to be random at all:

19:   c3                      ret
1a:   8d b6 00 00 00 00       lea    0x0(%esi),%esi

It always seems to be either 8d b6 00 00 00 00 ... or 8d 74 26 00.

Do function padding bytes have any significance?

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