Re: Unsigned widening casts of binary "not" operations..

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:59 AM, David Laight <David.Laight@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> If the narrower type is signed it is probably even more confusing!
> The high bits will be preserved unless you are masking off bit 31.

Yes. However, that case doesn't trigger with the normal case of small
values. So "~4" works fine with widening, in a way that "~4u" does
not.

Which doesn't mean that you aren't right, it only means that it's
harder to check for in sparse. The hacky little patch I sent out with
already resulted in a lot of noise for things like "~0u" (UINT_MAX)
and the "~4u" use in NLMSG_ALIGNTO, I'd dread to do the same for
signed values.

That said, with the most minimal value analysis (ie only looking at
constants), maybe it wouldn't be too bad. I started out just worrying
about the PAGE_MASK case, though, where we're talking about (somewhat
complicated) generated constants, and then the signed case is largely
irrelevant (although a signed "1 << 31" would - as you say - trigger
this same thing too).

                         Linus
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/