Re: [PATCH] size-in-bytes

[Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 11:43:38PM +0100, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> We want to stay with the shift counts.  They should be the primary currency
> of size measurement.  You can add shift counts together and get nice, compact
> code, whereas with absolute size you often have to ugly things - e.g., it's a
> pain to divide by blocksize when you have it as an absolute number, it's easy
> when you have it as a shift.
> 
> If you are going to the trouble of fixing this, please don't use absolute
> size as the primary measure, use a shift count.

Most of this is targetted at userland which needs byte counts (size in 
sectors was a bug introduced after the original BLKGETSIZE64 went in).  
Using the number of sectors in kernel is perhaps more efficient, but it 
is a microoptimization that won't show up on any benchmarks.

		-ben