Re: patch: signed char issues

Philip Blundell (Philip.Blundell@pobox.com)
Mon, 24 Apr 2000 10:41:03 +0100

>> Here's a handful of patches for areas of the kernel that assume `char' is
>> a signed type. It was generated against 2.3.99-pre3 but it seems to =
>> apply cleanly against -pre5 as well.
>
>Are you sure this is really needed? On a machine with native unsigned char
>this might be a sizeable performance impact for each use.

Yes, there is a performance impact to using `signed char' on machines where
char is normally unsigned. But the situation without the patch is that the
code in question is completely broken, which is probably even worse.

Most of the signed char issues are in code that isn't performance critical
anyway.

p.

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