From: Nick Piggin <redacted>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:38:19 +1000

Except for the braindead volatile that gets stuck on the bitops pointer.

Last time I complained about this, a lot of noise was made and I think
Linus wanted it to stay around so we could pass volatile pointers to
bitops & co without warnings. I say we should just remove the volatile
and kill any callers that might warn...

Ho hum... :)

Another way to approach that, and keep the volatile, is to have
a "test_flags()" interface that takes the bit mask of values
you want to test for cases where you know it is a single word
flags value.

The downside is that this kind of interface is easy to use
incorrectly especially when accesses to the same flags use
bot test_bit() and test_flags().