Maybe they shouldn't have, but there was no realistic alternative. At the time, C compilers weren't as "smart" and the sort of trickery they're doing was a perf

Maybe they shouldn't have, but there was no realistic alternative. At the time, C compilers weren't as "smart" and the sort of trickery they're doing was a perfectly reasonable thing to try in C. Today, if you were starting a kernel project from scratch, I'd think Rust would deserve a good, hard look.