Code Styling Tips

Here are some miscellaneous tips for good code styling:

Proper Linux Kernel Coding Style
See the kernel coding style guide in any kernel source tree at: Documentation/CodingStyle (Online here)

Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote some additional tips in his article: Proper Linux Kernel Coding Style

Michael S. Tsirkin made years ago a kernel guide to space aka a boring list of rules which can be used to start a non-rhetoric article about Coding Style. The related thread in LKML worth to be read.

use of #ifdefs
Rob Landley writes:

Read: http://www.chris-lott.org/resources/cstyle/ifdefs.pdf

Personally, I tend to have symbols #defined to a constant 0 or 1 depending on whether or not a function is enabled, and then just use if(SYMBOL) as a guard and let the compiler's dead code eliminator take it out for me at compile time (because if(0) {blah;} shouldn't put any code in the resulting .o file with any optimizer worth its salt. Borland C for DOS managed simple dead code elimination 20 years ago...)