[syntheticnature]

Doubly agreed -- similar patterns appear elsewhere to avoid off-by-one errors and bitmasking is fairly intuitive to anyone regularly working at that level. I was surprised at the author not recognizing this idiom, but you have to learn it sometime!

I was further stunned by the seeming naivety of the author's align_2() implementation, but then it does get the job done, eventually. My naive approach would've been roughly align_3(), but using integer math and modulus.

On the other hand, younger team members were recently stunned by code I did for translation of a binary protocol into more easily handled pieces using what I think of as typical idioms, so this article might get sent around Monday morning.

[rzezeski]

Hi, author here. My align_2 implementation is indeed very naive. Part of that was to show just how much overhead a naive implementation could add, in this case 3 orders of magnitude. I'm also new to systems programming. This article should serve as a reminder to experienced hackers that idioms are often only obvious _after_ they've been explained. My last 4 years were spent working on a distributed database; I could bring up "obvious" idioms from that world that might perplex a kernel hacker.

But you are right, this is indeed a very obvious line of code once you understand it. Thank you for your comments.

[syntheticnature]

The key being "once you understand it." I look forward to sending this around to make sure folks "get it" -- that which I grasp intuitively is magic for them[1], and kernel hacking is rarely the deep topic people imagine it to be. I doubt I have the right perspective to explain this as clearly, and if I could, I lack the time to do so as deeply.

[1]Their words, heard within the past month.