UB in various hypot() implementations (left-shifting a negative number)
Steve Kargl
sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu
Wed Nov 13 23:22:36 UTC 2019
Looks good to me. Just need to convince someone to commit it.
--
steve
On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 02:43:04PM -0800, Jeff Walden wrote:
>
> Just wanted to note here that I filed https://reviews.freebsd.org/D22354 to fix a bit of undefined behavior in the hypot() function implementations.
>
> `hypot(x, y)` computes `sqrt(x*x + y*y)`, with IEEE-754-aware precision. For very large or small `x` or `y`, the naive implementation would lose precision -- so in such cases the calculation is performed after multiplying the numbers by a very large (or very small) power of two, then the multiplication is undone at end.
>
> Undoing the multiplication involves multiplying a quantity `w` by `2**k`, where `k` (which may be positive or negative) was computed depending on the particular `x` and `y` values provided. Current algorithms generally take `t1=0.0`, extract the high word, add `k<<20` or `k<<23` to it to appropriately bump the exponent, then overwrite `t1`'s high word. But it seems equally effective to take `t1=0.0`, then write `(1023+k)<<20` or `(127+k)<<23` to it for identical effect -- and `k` is never so negative to compute a negative value. My changes do this. (I wish there were named constants I could use for all these numbers, but as there don't seem to be any, magic numbers seems like the best I can do.)
>
> Errors in these changes would most likely produce a power of two off by a factor of two, so *probably* testing any inputs that would happen to invoke these code paths should be adequate testing. I'm fixing this in order to upstream a likely fix in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine for this, so the (double, double) algorithm/change is the only one I have (purely manually) tested. Eyeballs on the other functions' changes especially appreciated!
>
> Jeff
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--
Steve
20170425 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWUpyCsUKR4
20161221 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbCHE-hONow
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