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Patch "string_helpers: fix precision loss for some inputs" has been added to the 4.4-stable tree

PATCH [email protected] 1 participant 1 message Feb 24, 2016

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This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

string_helpers: fix precision loss for some inputs

to the 4.4-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
string_helpers-fix-precision-loss-for-some-inputs.patch
and it can be found in the queue-4.4 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <[email protected]> know about it.

Quoted 1 line

From 564b026fbd0d28e9f70fb3831293d2922bb7855b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001

From: James Bottomley <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2016 14:58:29 -0800
Subject: string_helpers: fix precision loss for some inputs

From: James Bottomley <[email protected]>

commit 564b026fbd0d28e9f70fb3831293d2922bb7855b upstream.

It was noticed that we lose precision in the final calculation for some inputs. The most egregious example is size=3000 blk_size=1900 in units of 10 should yield 5.70 MB but in fact yields 3.00 MB (oops).

This is because the current algorithm doesn't correctly account for all the remainders in the logarithms. Fix this by doing a correct calculation in the remainders based on napier's algorithm.

Additionally, now we have the correct result, we have to account for arithmetic rounding because we're printing 3 digits of precision. This means that if the fourth digit is five or greater, we have to round up, so add a section to ensure correct rounding. Finally account for all possible inputs correctly, including zero for block size.

---
 lib/string_helpers.c |   63 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------------
 1 file changed, 43 insertions(+), 20 deletions(-)
lib/string_helpers.c +43 -20
@@ -43,50 +43,73 @@ void string_get_size(u64 size, u64 blk_s
 		[STRING_UNITS_10] = 1000,
 		[STRING_UNITS_2] = 1024,
 	};
-	int i, j;
-	u32 remainder = 0, sf_cap, exp;
+	static const unsigned int rounding[] = { 500, 50, 5 };
+	int i = 0, j;
+	u32 remainder = 0, sf_cap;
 	char tmp[8];
 	const char *unit;
 
 	tmp[0] = '\0';
-	i = 0;
-	if (!size)
+
+	if (blk_size == 0)
+		size = 0;
+	if (size == 0)
 		goto out;
 
-	while (blk_size >= divisor[units]) {
-		remainder = do_div(blk_size, divisor[units]);
+	/* This is Napier's algorithm.  Reduce the original block size to
+	 *
+	 * coefficient * divisor[units]^i
+	 *
+	 * we do the reduction so both coefficients are just under 32 bits so
+	 * that multiplying them together won't overflow 64 bits and we keep
+	 * as much precision as possible in the numbers.
+	 *
+	 * Note: it's safe to throw away the remainders here because all the
+	 * precision is in the coefficients.
+	 */
+	while (blk_size >> 32) {
+		do_div(blk_size, divisor[units]);
 		i++;
 	}
 
-	exp = divisor[units] / (u32)blk_size;
-	/*
-	 * size must be strictly greater than exp here to ensure that remainder
-	 * is greater than divisor[units] coming out of the if below.
-	 */
-	if (size > exp) {
-		remainder = do_div(size, divisor[units]);
-		remainder *= blk_size;
+	while (size >> 32) {
+		do_div(size, divisor[units]);
 		i++;
-	} else {
-		remainder *= size;
 	}
 
+	/* now perform the actual multiplication keeping i as the sum of the
+	 * two logarithms */
 	size *= blk_size;
-	size += remainder / divisor[units];
-	remainder %= divisor[units];
 
+	/* and logarithmically reduce it until it's just under the divisor */
 	while (size >= divisor[units]) {
 		remainder = do_div(size, divisor[units]);
 		i++;
 	}
 
+	/* work out in j how many digits of precision we need from the
+	 * remainder */
 	sf_cap = size;
 	for (j = 0; sf_cap*10 < 1000; j++)
 		sf_cap *= 10;
 
-	if (j) {
+	if (units == STRING_UNITS_2) {
+		/* express the remainder as a decimal.  It's currently the
+		 * numerator of a fraction whose denominator is
+		 * divisor[units], which is 1 << 10 for STRING_UNITS_2 */
 		remainder *= 1000;
-		remainder /= divisor[units];
+		remainder >>= 10;
+	}
+
+	/* add a 5 to the digit below what will be printed to ensure
+	 * an arithmetical round up and carry it through to size */
+	remainder += rounding[j];
+	if (remainder >= 1000) {
+		remainder -= 1000;
+		size += 1;
+	}
+
+	if (j) {
 		snprintf(tmp, sizeof(tmp), ".%03u", remainder);
 		tmp[j+1] = '\0';
 	}

Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are

queue-4.4/string_helpers-fix-precision-loss-for-some-inputs.patch