bit fields && data tearing

[One Thousand Gnomes]

> Besides updating the documentation, it may make sense to do something
> arch-specific. Just bumping out storage on arches that don't need it
> seems wasteful, as does generating bus locks on arches that don't need it.
> Unfortunately, the code churn looks unavoidable.

The arch specific is pretty much set_bit and friends. Bus locks on a
locally owned cache line should not be very expensive on anything vaguely
modern, while uniprocessor boxes usually only have to generate set_bit
as a single instruction so it is interrupt safe.

Alan