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Re: [PATCH v2.0] Use saturated arithmetic for overflow detection.
- From: Paul Eggert <eggert at cs dot ucla dot edu>
- To: OndÅej BÃlka <neleai at seznam dot cz>
- Cc: libc-alpha at sourceware dot org
- Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 17:10:26 -0700
- Subject: Re: [PATCH v2.0] Use saturated arithmetic for overflow detection.
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- References: <20131030174502 dot GA18107 at domone dot podge> <Pine dot LNX dot 4 dot 64 dot 1310301749400 dot 22878 at digraph dot polyomino dot org dot uk> <20131030183318 dot GA18706 at domone dot podge> <20131101133126 dot GA2546 at domone dot podge> <5273E29D dot 90000 at cs dot ucla dot edu> <20131101175802 dot GA5471 at domone dot podge> <527412A1 dot 8080707 at cs dot ucla dot edu> <20131101215358 dot GA7000 at domone dot podge>
OndÅej BÃlka wrote:
> Weird as I cannot get these on athlon X2 and phenom X6. As one iteration takes
> 2.096 * 2600 / 340 = 16 cycles a slowdown is 8 cycles which is hard to explain.
>
> I attached binaries which were used to test (gcc version 4.4.5 (Debian 4.4.5-8))
Yes, it's weird. I built binaries on Ubuntu 13.10 and ran them
on the Deneb machine in question and the times were identical.
Even stranger: the 2x difference came when I was using a GCC 4.8.2
that I built myself, unmodified from the sources. When I switched
to the system-supplied Fedora 19 GCC 4.8.2 20131017 (Red Hat 4.8.2-1),
the performance difference went away.
Could be a caching thing, I suppose. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
> overhead is versus version with no checking.
The measurement I'd like to see is how much does it bloat
the code compared to the way we're doing it now, namely,
p = malloc (add_sat (mul_sat (a, b), c));
versus
p = a <= (SIZE_MAX - c) / b < malloc (a * b + c) : (errno=ENOMEM, NULL);
or perhaps this would be a better comparison:
p = malloc (a <= (SIZE_MAX - c) / b ? a * b + c : SIZE_MAX);
or, if we're going to go off the deep end tuning anyway, perhaps
we should have a muladd_s primitive that does multiply *and* add!