On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:59 AM, David Laight <David.Laight@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > If the narrower type is signed it is probably even more confusing! > The high bits will be preserved unless you are masking off bit 31. Yes. However, that case doesn't trigger with the normal case of small values. So "~4" works fine with widening, in a way that "~4u" does not. Which doesn't mean that you aren't right, it only means that it's harder to check for in sparse. The hacky little patch I sent out with already resulted in a lot of noise for things like "~0u" (UINT_MAX) and the "~4u" use in NLMSG_ALIGNTO, I'd dread to do the same for signed values. That said, with the most minimal value analysis (ie only looking at constants), maybe it wouldn't be too bad. I started out just worrying about the PAGE_MASK case, though, where we're talking about (somewhat complicated) generated constants, and then the signed case is largely irrelevant (although a signed "1 << 31" would - as you say - trigger this same thing too). Linus -- 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