RE: [mpm@selenic.com: Re: buggy ia64_fls() ? (was Re: /dev/random problem on 2.6.12-rc1)]

Luck, Tony
2005-04-08T23:02:15Z

>So there's the off-by-one problem. And then there's the huge
>discontinuity at 0. Trouble is the bias is 65535 rather than 65536 so
>there's no masking trick that works. We could instead to do
>exp((x*2)+1).

That will fail for x=0x8000000000000000 ... returns '1' instead of '64'.

-Tony