Subject: Re: [NETFILTER] xt_hashlimit : speedups hash_dst()

From: Jarek Poplawski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:59:30 +0100

Eric Dumazet wrote, On 12/14/2007 12:09 PM:
...

> +	/*
> +	 * Instead of returning hash % ht->cfg.size (implying a divide)
> +	 * we return the high 32 bits of the (hash * ht->cfg.size) that will
> +	 * give results between [0 and cfg.size-1] and same hash distribution,
> +	 * but using a multiply, less expensive than a divide
> +	 */
> +	return ((u64)hash * ht->cfg.size) >> 32;

Are we sure of the same hash distribution? Probably I miss something,
but: if this 'hash' is well distributed on 32 bits, and ht->cfg.size
is smaller than 32 bits, e.g. 256 (8 bits), then this multiplication
moves to the higher 32 of u64 only max. 8 bits of the most significant
byte, and the other three bytes are never used, while division is
always affected by all four bytes...

Regards,
Jarek P.