Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 16:18:03 -0800
From: Ravikiran G Thirumalai <kiran@scalex86.org>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Cc: Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@kvack.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       davem@davemloft.net, netdev@vger.kernel.org, shai@scalex86.org
Subject: Re: [patch 1/4] net: percpufy frequently used vars -- add percpu_counter_mod_bh
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On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 03:43:21PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@kvack.org> wrote:
> >
> > I think it may make more sense to simply convert local_t into a long, given 
> > that most of the users will be things like stats counters.
> > 
> 
> Yes, I agree that making local_t signed would be better.  It's consistent
> with atomic_t, atomic64_t and atomic_long_t and it's a bit more flexible.
> 
> Perhaps.  A lot of applications would just be upcounters for statistics,
> where unsigned is desired.  But I think the consistency argument wins out.

It already is... for most of the arches except x86_64.
And on -mm, the asm-generic version uses atomic_long_t for local_t (signed
long) which seems right.

Although, I wonder why we use:

#define local_read(l) ((unsigned long)atomic_long_read(&(l)->a))

It would return a huge value if the local counter was even -1 no?

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