On Thu, Sep 04, 2014 at 12:40:06PM +0200, Rasmus Villemoes wrote: > The C operator <= defines a perfectly fine total ordering on the set > of values representable in a long. However, unlike its namesake in the > integers, it is not translation invariant, meaning that we do not have > "b <= c" iff "a+b <= a+c" for all a,b,c. > > This means that it is always wrong to try to boil down the > relationship between two longs to a question about the sign of their > difference, because the resulting relation [a LEQ b iff a-b <= 0] is > neither anti-symmetric or transitive. The former is due to > -LONG_MIN==LONG_MIN (take any two a,b with a-b = LONG_MIN; then a LEQ > b and b LEQ a, but a != b). The latter can either be seen observing > that x LEQ x+1 for all x, implying x LEQ x+1 LEQ x+2 ... LEQ x-1 LEQ > x; or more directly with the simple example a=LONG_MIN, b=0, c=1, for > which a-b < 0, b-c < 0, but a-c > 0. > > Note that it makes absolutely no difference that a transmogrying > bijection has been applied before the comparison is done. In fact, had > the obfuscation not been done, one could probably not observe the bug > (assuming all values being compared always lie in one half of the > address space, the mathematical value of a-b is always representable > in a long). As it stands, one can easily obtain three file descriptors > exhibiting the non-transitivity of kcmp(). > > Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Just noted that Andrew's email address has been screwed for some reason, fixed. Guys, pick it up please, and many thanks to Rasmus for finding it. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html