On 09/10/19 10:16, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 09:15:03AM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> For stuff like hardware registers, bitfields are probably a bad idea
>> anyway, so let's only consider the case of space optimization.
>
> Except for hardware registers? I actually like bitfields to describe
> hardware registers.
In theory yes, in practice for MMIO it's a problem that you're not able
to see the exact compiler reads or writes. Of course you can do:
union {
struct {
/* some bitfields here
} u;
u32 val;
}
and only use the bitfields after reading/writing from the register.
> But worse, as used in the parent thread:
>
> u8 count:7;
> bool flag:1;
>
> Who says the @flag thing will even be the msb of the initial u8 and not
> a whole new variable due to change in base type?
Good point.
>> bool bitfields preserve the magic behavior where something like this:
>>
>> foo->x = y;
>>
>> (x is a bool bitfield) would be compiled as
>>
>> foo->x = (y != 0);
>
> This is confusion; if y is a single bit bitfield, then there is
> absolutely _NO_ difference between these two expressions.
y is not in a struct so it cannot be a single bit bitfield. :) If y is
an int and foo->x is a bool bitfield, you get the following:
foo->x = 6; /* foo->x is 1, it would be 0 for int:1 */
foo->x = 7; /* foo->x is 1, it would be 1 for int:1 */
Anyway it's good that we agree on the important thing about the patch!
Paolo
> The _only_ thing about _Bool is that it magically casts values to 0,1.
> Single bit bitfield variables have no choice but to already be in that
> range.
