Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> once upon a time, the kernel source code was replete with
> conditional constructs of the form:
>
> if ((n & (n-1)) == 0)
>
> as a way of testing whether something was a power of two. mercifully,
> include/linux/log2.h was created which introduced, among other things:
>
> static inline __attribute__((const))
> bool is_power_of_2(unsigned long n)
> {
> return (n != 0 && ((n & (n - 1)) == 0));
> }
>
> so we could simply ask whether "is_power_of_2(n)", which is convenient
> when we're testing things like, oh, blocksize.
>
> similarly, there are bunches of places which need to test whether an
> integer value has only a single set bit (for instance, to make sure
> only one flag bit out of a number of mutually exclusive bits are set).
>
> mathematically, that would be the same test, of course, but
> semantically, it would be ugly and inappropriate. is there,
> somewhere, a corresponding macro/function that asks:
>
> single_bit_set(n)
>
> if not, that would be handy, could be plopped into
> include/linux/bitops.h and could be defined exactly the same way, and
> would allow piles of code to be simplified.
>
> thoughts?
single_bit_set(n) is equivalent to
hamming weight(n) == 1
lib/hweight.c implements hamming weights for 8/16/32/64-bit args.
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