cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Archives Discussions

briandamgaard
Journeyman III

Serious bug in widely used AMD publication

Publication:

----------------

AMD Athlon Processor x86 Code Optimization Guide

Publication  No.: 22007

Revision: K

Date: February 2002

Bug:

--------

Serious bug in all integer-64 division and remainder assembler routines:

* _ulldiv

* _lldiv

* _ullrem

* _llrem

Example:

-------------

An unsigned division example:

(2**64 - 1 ) divided by (2**32 + 3):

18446744073709551615 div 4294967299 = 4294967294 (wrong)

The correct result: 4294967293

The problem:

-----------------

The problem is that the assembler code doesn't implement the "Hacker's Delight" division correctly. A description of the algorithm can be found here:

http://www.hackersdelight.org/hdcodetxt/divDouble.c.txt

Importance:

----------------

Please note that:

* The bugs spreads like a virus because many software products and programmers assume the publication it the autoritative implementation of these routines

* The use of these routines will not die out just because modern 64-bit hardware has native support for 64-integers. Software always need double-integer support and programmers simply change the four routines to operate on whatever the double-integer bit-size is, e..g, 128 bits nowadays.

For this reason it's imperative to make the public aware of the bug. I hope AMD will take action on this.

0 Likes
0 Replies