e2fsck hanging

[Brian Davidson]

On Mar 20, 2007, at 6:59 PM, Theodore Tso wrote:

> 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

With a float, you're still trying to cram 32 bits into a 24 bit  
mantissa (23 bits + implicit bit).  If nothing else, the float should  
get changed to a double which has a 53 bit mantissa (52 + implicit  
bit).  Just catching the case where division goes to one causes it to  
do a linear search.  Given that this only occurs on really big  
filesystems, that's probably not what you want to do...

Brian