Re: [PATCH 02/10] x86, asm: use bool for bitops and other assembly outputs

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Wed Jun 08 2016 - 04:56:32 EST


On 06/08/16 01:33, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> Note that this particular build error was introduced by b0bdba9825fe, a later
> patch in this series - but in generaly I'm uneasy about allowing function
> signatures diverge between architectures.
>

For the bitops, they already do: PowerPC, for example, have "unsigned
long" in places where x86 has "int". This is obviously undesirable, but
apparently we have not found it enough of a problem to deal with. One
could easily argue the ppc definition is the better one; I was myself
considering promoting the x86 side to "long" to handle enormous bitmaps.
At the same time, it is hard to avoid the fact that ppc has unsigned
bitops operations and x86 has signed ones when they are both native
instructions.

-hpa