Messages in this thread |  | | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Date | Mon, 2 Apr 2018 16:49:39 -0700 | Subject | Re: [PATCH] bitmap: fix memset optimization on big-endian systems |
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On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 4:37 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote: > > We should probably have at least switched it to "unsigned long int"
I meant just "unsigned int", of course.
Right now we occasionally have a silly 64-bit field just for a couple of flags.
Of course, we do have cases where 64-bit architectures happily end up using more than 32 bits too, so the "unsigned long" is occasionally useful. But it's rare enough that it probably wasn't the right thing to do.
Water under the bridge. Part of it is due to another historical accident: the alpha port was one of the early ports, and it didn't do atomic byte accesses at all.
So we had multiple issues that all conspired to "unsigned long arrays are the natural for atomic bit operations" even though they have this really annoying byte order issue.
Linus
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