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Commit 36126f8f authored by Linus Torvalds's avatar Linus Torvalds
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word-at-a-time: make the interfaces truly generic

This changes the interfaces in <asm/word-at-a-time.h> to be a bit more
complicated, but a lot more generic.

In particular, it allows us to really do the operations efficiently on
both little-endian and big-endian machines, pretty much regardless of
machine details.  For example, if you can rely on a fast population
count instruction on your architecture, this will allow you to make your
optimized <asm/word-at-a-time.h> file with that.

NOTE! The "generic" version in include/asm-generic/word-at-a-time.h is
not truly generic, it actually only works on big-endian.  Why? Because
on little-endian the generic algorithms are wasteful, since you can
inevitably do better. The x86 implementation is an example of that.

(The only truly non-generic part of the asm-generic implementation is
the "find_zero()" function, and you could make a little-endian version
of it.  And if the Kbuild infrastructure allowed us to pick a particular
header file, that would be lovely)

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parent 4ae73f2d
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