Make the "word-at-a-time" helper functions more commonly usable
authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Fri, 6 Apr 2012 20:54:56 +0000 (13:54 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Fri, 6 Apr 2012 20:54:56 +0000 (13:54 -0700)
commitf68e556e23d1a4176b563bcb25d8baf2c5313f91
tree4c43c375dd0c608ed506953d80ebfedacca37161
parent23f347ef63aa36b5a001b6791f657cd0e2a04de3
Make the "word-at-a-time" helper functions more commonly usable

I have a new optimized x86 "strncpy_from_user()" that will use these
same helper functions for all the same reasons the name lookup code uses
them.  This is preparation for that.

This moves them into an architecture-specific header file.  It's
architecture-specific for two reasons:

 - some of the functions are likely to want architecture-specific
   implementations.  Even if the current code happens to be "generic" in
   the sense that it should work on any little-endian machine, it's
   likely that the "multiply by a big constant and shift" implementation
   is less than optimal for an architecture that has a guaranteed fast
   bit count instruction, for example.

 - I expect that if architectures like sparc want to start playing
   around with this, we'll need to abstract out a few more details (in
   particular the actual unaligned accesses).  So we're likely to have
   more architecture-specific stuff if non-x86 architectures start using
   this.

   (and if it turns out that non-x86 architectures don't start using
   this, then having it in an architecture-specific header is still the
   right thing to do, of course)

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
arch/x86/include/asm/word-at-a-time.h [new file with mode: 0644]
fs/namei.c