Re: [PATCH] bitmap: fix memset optimization on big-endian systems

[Omar Sandoval]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 04:49:39PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 4:37 PM, Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.

Not to mention the mix of bit fields, macros, and enums, some of which
are bit masks, some of which are the bit number :)

> 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.

Thanks for the historical context, this is exactly what I was wondering
when I spotted this bug and fixed a similar one in Btrfs a couple of
years back.