1. predict the file was found 2. explicitly compare the ref to "one", ignoring the dead zone The latter arguably improves the behavior to begin with. Suppose the count turned bad -- the previously used ref routine is going to check for it and return 0, indicating the count does not necessitate taking ->f_pos_lock. But there very well may be several users. i.e. not paying for special-casing the dead zone improves semantics. While here spell out each condition in a dedicated if statement. This has no effect on generated code. Sizes are as follows (in bytes; gcc 13, x86-64): stock: 321 likely(): 298 likely()+ref: 280 Signed-off-by: Mateusz Guzik <mjguzik@gmail.com> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250319215801.1870660-1-mjguzik@gmail.com Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>