On Wed, Oct 06, 2021 at 05:32:39PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote: > It feels to me like using __bitwise for access checks and then still > modifying the __bitwise fields randomly via a backdoor. But sure, if it > works, I'll be happy if we can use that. __bitwise == "can't do anything other than bitwise operations without an explicit force-cast". All there is to it. Hell, the very first use had been for things like __le32 et.al., where the primitives very much do non-bitwise accesses. They are known to be safe (== do the same thing regardless of the host endianness). Internally they contain force-casts, precisely so that the caller wouldn't need to.