Messages in this thread | | | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Date | Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:30:55 -0800 | Subject | Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] siphash: add cryptographically secure hashtable function |
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On Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 2:56 PM, Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com> wrote: > > So actually jhash_Nwords makes no sense, since it takes dwords > (32-bits) not words (16-bits). The siphash analog should be called > siphash24_Nqwords.
No. The bug is talking about "words" in the first place.
Depending on your background, a "word" can be generally be either 16 bits or 32 bits (or, in some cases, 18 bits).
In theory, a 64-bit entity can be a "word" too, but pretty much nobody uses that. Even architectures that started out with a 64-bit register size and never had any smaller historical baggage (eg alpha) tend to call 32-bit entities "words".
So 16 bits can be a word, but some people/architectures will call it a "half-word".
To make matters even more confusing, a "quadword" is generally always 64 bits, regardless of the size of "word".
So please try to avoid the use of "word" entirely. It's too ambiguous, and it's not even helpful as a "size of the native register". It's almost purely random.
For the kernel, we tend use
- uX for types that have specific sizes (X being the number of bits)
- "[unsigned] long" for native register size
But never "word".
Linus
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