The pattern of setting variable with new value and returning old one is very common in kernel. Usually atomicity of the operation is not required, so xchg seems to be suboptimal and confusing in such cases. Since name xchg is already in use and __xchg is used in architecture code, proposition is to name the macro exchange. Signed-off-by: Andrzej Hajda <andrzej.hajda@xxxxxxxxx> --- Hi, I hope there will be place for such tiny helper in kernel. Quick cocci analyze shows there is probably few thousands places where it could be used, of course I do not intend to do it :). I was not sure where to put this macro, I hope near swap definition is the most suitable place. Moreover sorry if to/cc is not correct - get_maintainers.pl was more confused than me, to who address this patch. Regards Andrzej --- include/linux/minmax.h | 14 ++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 14 insertions(+) diff --git a/include/linux/minmax.h b/include/linux/minmax.h index 5433c08fcc6858..17d48769203bd5 100644 --- a/include/linux/minmax.h +++ b/include/linux/minmax.h @@ -144,4 +144,18 @@ #define swap(a, b) \ do { typeof(a) __tmp = (a); (a) = (b); (b) = __tmp; } while (0) +/** + * exchange - set variable pointed by @ptr to @val, return old value + * @ptr: pointer to affected variable + * @val: value to be written + * + * This is non-atomic variant of xchg. + */ +#define exchange(ptr, val) ({ \ + typeof(ptr) __ptr = ptr; \ + typeof(*__ptr) __t = *__ptr; \ + *(__ptr) = (val); \ + __t; \ +}) + #endif /* _LINUX_MINMAX_H */ -- 2.34.1