Re: [PATCH] posix-cpu-timers: Merge running and checking_timer state in one field

[Jason Low <jason.low@hpe.com>]

On Tue, 2015-10-20 at 02:18 +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> This way we might consume less space in the signal struct (well,
> depending on bool size or padding) and we don't need to worry about
> ordering between the running and checking_timers fields.

This looks fine to me. I ended up going with booleans since I thought
that makes the code more readable, but this method would be okay too.

I do have 1 question below.

> +/* struct thread_group_cputimer::state bits */
> +#define CPUTIMER_STATE_RUNNING		1
> +#define CPUTIMER_STATE_CHECKING		2
> +
>  /**
>   * struct thread_group_cputimer - thread group interval timer counts
>   * @cputime_atomic:	atomic thread group interval timers.
> - * @running:		true when there are timers running and
> - *			@cputime_atomic receives updates.
> - * @checking_timer:	true when a thread in the group is in the
> - *			process of checking for thread group timers.
> - *
> + * @state:		flags describing the current state of the cputimer.
> + *			CPUTIMER_STATE_RUNNING bit means the timers is elapsing.
> + * 			CPUTIMER_STATE_CHECKING bit means that the cputimer has
> + *			expired and a thread in the group is checking the
> + *			callback list.
>   * This structure contains the version of task_cputime, above, that is
>   * used for thread group CPU timer calculations.
>   */
>  struct thread_group_cputimer {
> -	struct task_cputime_atomic cputime_atomic;
> -	bool running;
> -	bool checking_timer;
> +	struct task_cputime_atomic	cputime_atomic;
> +	unsigned int 			state;

Here are we actually increasing the overhead from 2 bytes -> 4 bytes? If
we want to use less space, I was thinking 'unsigned char'.