If you do multiple byte lookups concurrently (eg "hash_name()", which looks for both NUL and '/' bytes), after you've done the prep_zero_mask() phase, the result of those can be or'ed together to get the "either or" case. - The result from "prep_zero_mask()" can then be fed into "find_zero()" (to find the byte offset of the first byte that was zero) or into "zero_bytemask()" (to find the bytemask of the bytes preceding the zero byte). The existence of zero_bytemask() is optional, and is not necessary for the normal string routines. But dentry name hashing needs it, so if you enable DENTRY_WORD_AT_A_TIME you need to expose it. This changes the generic strncpy_from_user() function and the dentry hashing functions to use these modified word-at-a-time interfaces. This gets us back to the optimized state of the x86 strncpy that we lost in the previous commit when moving over to the generic version. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds “Ï