- Set bits and clear bits down in the must-be-zero low-order
bits of that pointer. This clearly means that the pointer
must have alignment constraints, for example, this does
- -not- work in general for char* pointers.
+ *not* work in general for char* pointers.
- XOR bits to translate pointers, as is done in some
classic buddy-allocator algorithms.
Please see the "CONTROL DEPENDENCIES" section of
Documentation/memory-barriers.txt for more details.
- - The pointers are not equal -and- the compiler does
+ - The pointers are not equal *and* the compiler does
not have enough information to deduce the value of the
pointer. Note that the volatile cast in rcu_dereference()
will normally prevent the compiler from knowing too much.
return values. This can result in "p->b" returning pre-initialization
garbage values.
-In short, rcu_dereference() is -not- optional when you are going to
+In short, rcu_dereference() is *not* optional when you are going to
dereference the resulting pointer.