Please see: e6022603b9aa7d61d20b392e69edcdbbc1789969 Having a look at the LKML archives this was raised back in 2006: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/6/23/337 I'm not interested in whether unlikely() actually helps here. I'm still missing _why_ rsv is mostly NULL at this callsite, as Andrew asserted here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/6/23/400 And then Steve here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/6/24/76 Where he said: "The problem is that in these cases the pointer is NULL several thousands of times for every time it is not NULL (if ever). The non-NULL case is where an error occurred or something very special. So I don't see how the if here is a problem?" I'm missing which error or what "something very special" is the unlikely() reason for having rsv be NULL. Looking at the code; ext3_clear_inode() is _the_ place where the i_block_alloc_info is cleaned up. In my testing the rsv is _never_ NULL if the file was open for writing. Are we saying that reads are much more common than writes? May be a reasonable assumption but saying as much is very different than what Steve seemed to be eluding to... Anyway, I'd appreciate some clarification here. thanks, Mike -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
