Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2019 14:43:04 -0800 From: Jeff Walden <jwalden@mit.edu> To: freebsd-numerics@freebsd.org Subject: UB in various hypot() implementations (left-shifting a negative number) Message-ID: <ecf6c3ed-dea7-ae4f-77fa-a6114b688fec@mit.edu>
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Hi all, 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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