I wasn't entirely convinced by the opinionated style doc that 80 meant columns and not characters (of COURSE it means columns, the opposite would be nonsense, but sometimes I get stubborn), so I looked up the kernel repo and indeed, my comment didn't pass the sniff test OR the scripts/checkpatch.pl test, where the max_line_length is enforced using calls to expand_tab, which converts tabs into 8 spaces before checking the length of the line.