Re: Arch maintainers Ahoy!

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:40 AM, David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Could you use cpu_to_be32/64() and then ffs()?  That ought to work for both
> variants of endianness.  The cpu_to_beXX() should be a noop on BE and is
> likely to be a single instruction on LE.  The meat of ffs() is usually a
> single instruction, though it may have to have zero-detect logic added.

First off, the *last* thing you want to do is go to big-endian mode.
All the bit counting gets *much* more complicated, and your argument
that it's "free" on some architectures is pointless, since it is only
free on the architectures that have the *least* users.

Secondly, it's not "likely a single instruction" on LE, neither is
ffs. It can be, but it's often one of the slower instructions.

Many architectures will have - but only in their most recent uarch
versions - popcount or similar, and if you're little-endian, that
would be what you want. Except we already figured out faster versions
for little-endian based on multiplication or a few add/shift
operations.

                        Linus