Re: correctly rounded mathematical functions

See below.

On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 10:23 AM Joel Sherrill <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 3:44 AM Paul Zimmermann <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> >        Dear Joel,
> >
> > thank you for your answer.
> >
> > > From: Joel Sherrill <[email protected]>
> > > Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2022 14:41:20 -0600
> > >
> > > On Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 6:58 AM Paul Zimmermann <
> [email protected]> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >       Dear Newlib developers,
> > > >
> > > > the current C working draft [1, p392] has reserved names for
> correctly
> > > > rounded functions (cr_exp, cr_log, cr_sin, ...).
> > > >
> > > > We propose to provide such correctly rounded implementations
> > > > for the three IEEE formats (binary32, binary64, binary128) and the
> > > > "extended double" format (long double on x86_64).
> > > >
> > > > These implementations will be correctly rounded for all rounding
> modes,
> > > > for example one could do the following to emulate interval
> arithmetic:
> > > >
> > > >    fesetround (FE_DOWNWARD);
> > > >    y_lo = cr_exp (x_lo);
> > > >    fesetround (FE_UPWARD);
> > > >    y_hi = cr_exp (x_hi);
> > > >
> > > > Users who want a fast implementation will call the exp/log/sin/...
> functions,
> > > > users who want a correctly rounded function and thus reproducible
> results
> > > > (whatever the hardware, compiler or operating system) will use the
> > > > cr_exp/cr_log/cr_sin/... functions. Our goal is nevertheless to get
> the
> > > > best performance possible.
> > > >
> > > > Our objective is to provide open-source implementations that can be
> integrated
> > > > in the major mathematical libraries (GNU libc, Intel Math Library,
> AMD Libm,
> > > > Redhat Newlib, OpenLibm, Musl, llvm-libc, CUDA, ROCm).
> > > >
> > > > Are developers of Newlib interested by such functions?
> > > > If so, we could discuss what would be the requirements for
> integration in
> > > > Newlib in terms of license, table size, allowed operations.
> > >
> > > Speaking from the RTEMS perspective, we are very interested
> > > in the addition of more POSIX and C Standard Library methods.
> > > We have been having GSoC students add them where possible
> > > for a few years.
> >
> > great!
> >
> > > The license has to be permissive and should have no advertising
> > > although based on COPYING.NEWLIB, some must have a BSD
> > > advertising clause still. Possibly those need review.
> > >
> > >
> https://sourceware.org/git/?p=newlib-cygwin.git;a=blob_plain;f=COPYING.NEWLIB;hb=HEAD
> >
> > since some Newlib files are already under LGPL v3+, for example
> > include/cgen/basic-ops.h, I guess the current
> > license we have (LGPL v3+) should be ok for Newlib.
>
> I think those files are all under a linux/ or rdos/ subdirectory and do not
> impact any other target unless they use iconvdata/. I grep'ed and didn't
> see anything else. Jeff or Corrina should speak up and provide a
> definitive answer.
>
>
Shared newlib code cannot have an LGPL license.  Our Linux code is for a
shared library
and uses code from glibc (including depending on glibc headers) so it is
permitted, but the code
is not shared with other platforms.

> > As long as the method's footprint only impacts applications that use
> > > it, there shouldn't be a huge concern on size but the target domain is
> > > mostly smaller single process, no-MMU embedded systems. That is
> > > ignoring Cygwin which has fewer constraints.  If you end up adding
> > > megabytes, that's going to be bad in general.
> >
> > we'll try to have reasonable table sizes. And maybe for some functions
> > we'll provide several implementations, with different table sizes.
>
> Great! It's hard to comment on size without something to complain about. :)
>
> > > > We have started to work on two functions (cbrt and acos), for which
> we
> > > > provide presumably correctly rounded implementations (up to the
> knowledge
> > > > of hard-to-round cases) [2].
> > >
> > > Great! What's the size profile on those?
> >
> > the binary32 cbrt code is quite small:
> >
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 zimmerma caramba   2766 Dec 23 14:27 cbrtf.c
> >
> > the binary128 code is larger:
> >
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 zimmerma caramba  38450 Dec 22 18:06 cbrtf128-v2.patch
>
> How is binary128 implemented on target CPUs without native support?
> Is this something GCC will include soft methods for?
>
> > > What's the minimum compiler or C language version to build these?
> >
> > good question. So far we work with current gcc versions (for example
> 11.2.0)
> > but did not exercise with older version. We don't use advanced C feature,
> > except the "glibc patches" use some GNU libc macros (for example
> mul_split
> > to split the product of two doubles into a+b, fast_two_sum, ...).
>
> I didn't expect anything too fancy. Will they compile with -std=c99, c11?
> newlib
> generally provides all methods but the header file guards protect the
> prototype
> visibility.
>
> glibc specific macros can be reimplemented. I assume that's going to be an
> issue on other non-glibc libraries.  Hopefully that's not too hard to deal
> with.
>
> --joel
>
> > Best regards,
> > Paul
>
>