Re: [PATCH 2/3] Turn bitmap_set and bitmap_clear into memset when possible

[Rasmus Villemoes]

> It's actually slightly less efficient in the caller (although obviously
> memset() is going to execute faster than bitmap_set()).  Partly because
> x86 made some odd choices about the behaviour of an 8-bit move instruction
> (it leaves the upper 24 bits intact, rather than zeroing them, so gcc
> has to use a 32-bit move instruction to put 0xff into the second argument
> to memset()),

Heh, I thought gcc knew and made full use of the semantics of memset,
so that only the low byte matters. I suppose there might be
architectures where passing -1 is slightly cheaper (at least in code
size) than 255... [quick checking] indeed, on x86_64, there's no
change in the generated code, but on 32 bit, gcc ends up doing

6a ff                   push   $0xffffffff

instead of

68 ff 00 00 00          push   $0xff