[libvirt] [PATCH 1/8] Add virRandom() API to generate numbers with non-power-of-2 limit

[Eric Blake]

On 08/10/2012 10:06 AM, Eric Blake wrote:

>> The alternative I wanted to use was  drand48_t() which returns a double

drand48_r

>> in the range 0.0 -> 1.0, with 48 bits of entropy. You could multiply by
>> 'max', and cast to int. But this isn't portable and is not fixed by
>> GNULIB.
> 
> Might not be too hard to make drand48_r into a gnulib module (harder
> than clz, but not intractible, so I'll take a shot at it, but no
> promises).  Using drand48_r does still hit non-uniformity due to
> rounding, but with much smaller fuzz factor (that is, instead of my
> example of 50/25/25, you'd be more like 25.000004, 24.999993,
> 24.999993), which I can live with as being in the noise.

If it wasn't obvious, I was typing this off the cuff rather than giving
actual numbers (still off the cuff, but real numbers would be more like
33.3333334, 33.3333333, 33.3333333 - something that actually adds up to
100% distribution).

> 
> No need to do that.  -lm already gives us a very nice function: ldexp().
>  Basically, you take an integer in the range [0,1<<48), then multiply
> that by 2**-48 using ldexp().

As we discussed on IRC, no need for drand48[_r], just use
ldexp(virRandomBits(48), -48).

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake at redhat.com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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