On 8/26/2024 11:14 PM, Bart Van Assche wrote:

On 8/26/24 10:06 AM, Kanchan Joshi wrote:

quoted

Change i_write_hint (in inode), bi_write_hint (in bio) and write_hint
(in request) to use u8 data-type rather than this enum.

That sounds fishy to me. Why to increase the size of this enum? Why to
reduce the ability of the compiler to perform type checking? I think
this needs to be motivated clearly in the patch description.

Since inode/bio/request stopped using this, the __packed annotation did 
not seem to serve much purpose. But sure, I can retain the size/checks 
on the renamed enum (rw_life_hint) too.

Motivation for keeping u8 in inode/bio/request is to represent another 
hint type. This is similar to ioprio where multiple io priority 
classes/values are expressed within an int type.