On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 09:44:07AM -0400, Richard Jackson wrote: > There are are few issues with the get_icount_el() code. First a simple > binary search may be sufficient. Also, We now know the float type is > not sufficient to handle the large or small values handled by this > code. One problem with using float is it does not have the precision > to divide two sufficently large numbers with a small enough > difference. The other issue is with float value approximation that > causes 'mid' to be larger than 'high'. The approximation is due to > float single-precision 23 bit mantissa. Values up to integer > 16,777,215 are handled as expected but starting at 16,777,216 the least > significant bits are truncated producing an approximation. The > approximation could be more or less than what is expected. This is a > feature of using float. Double type for IEEE 754 double-precision 64 > bit provides a 52 bit mantissa to play with. That is a large number. Well, keep in mind that the float is just as an optimization to doing a simple binary search. So it doesn't have to be precise; an approximation is fine, except when mid ends up being larger than high. But it's simple enough to catch that particular case where the division going to 1 instead of 0.99999 as we might expect. Catching that should be enough, I expect. - Ted _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
