Re: find_next_bit return type

["David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004 00:02:13 -0700
Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> wrote:

> Kind-of.  But it's also cringeworthy to go slinging 8-byte values around
> when 4-byte values would suffice.  Is it not more efficient to use
> integers?

They all go in registers, the same register that could hold the 4-byte
values too.  There is also no computational cost to doing 64-bit add
subtract and shift (ie. simple ALU's) compared to 32-bit ones.

The int return value is also evil on many 64-bit systems because
it's going to do all of the computations in the native largest natural
word size (64-bits) then chop it down and sign extent it to 'int' (32-bits)

On 32-bitters none of this prototype crap will matter, since both int
and long are 32-bit of course.

I'm not %100 against using unsigned int, it's just that I know it will
crap up the output code a bit for 64-bitters.