Re: [PATCH] mm: don't access vm_flags as 'int'

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Thu May 26 2011 - 14:50:31 EST


On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Woo-hoo!
>
> Why it is marked __nocast and not __bitwise__ like gfp_t?

Because that's what one of the other patches in Andrew's series had,
so I just emulated that.

Also, I don't think we can currently mark it __bitwise without causing
a sh*tload of sparse warnings. __nocast is much weaker than bitwise
(it only warns about implicit casts to different sizes). __bitwise
implies a lot more type-checking, and actually makes the result a very
specific type.

I'm not sure it is worth the __bitwise pain. If we go down the
__bitwise path, we'd need to mark all the VM_XYZZY constants with the
type, and we'd need to do *all* the conversions in one go. I am
definitely not ready to do that at this stage, but I was willing to
take the much weaker __nocast.

Linus
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