bpf: improve the general precision of tnum_mul

This commit addresses a challenge explained in an open question ("How
can we incorporate correlation in unknown bits across partial
products?") left by Harishankar et al. in their paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05398

When LSB(a) is uncertain, we know for sure that it is either 0 or 1,
from which we could find two possible partial products and take a
union. Experiment shows that applying this technique in long
multiplication improves the precision in a significant number of cases
(at the cost of losing precision in a relatively lower number of
cases).

This commit also removes the value-mask decomposition technique
employed by Harishankar et al., as its direct incorporation did not
result in any improvements for the new algorithm.

Signed-off-by: Nandakumar Edamana <[email protected]>

Author: nandedamana

include/linux/tnum.h

@@ -54,6 +54,9 @@ struct tnum tnum_mul(struct tnum a, struct tnum b);
 /* Return a tnum representing numbers satisfying both @a and @b */
 struct tnum tnum_intersect(struct tnum a, struct tnum b);
 
+/* Returns a tnum representing numbers satisfying either @a or @b */
+struct tnum tnum_union(struct tnum t1, struct tnum t2);
+
 /* Return @a with all but the lowest @size bytes cleared */
 struct tnum tnum_cast(struct tnum a, u8 size);
 

kernel/bpf/tnum.c

@@ -116,31 +116,39 @@ struct tnum tnum_xor(struct tnum a, struct tnum b)
 	return TNUM(v & ~mu, mu);
 }
 
-/* Generate partial products by multiplying each bit in the multiplier (tnum a)
- * with the multiplicand (tnum b), and add the partial products after
- * appropriately bit-shifting them. Instead of directly performing tnum addition
- * on the generated partial products, equivalenty, decompose each partial
- * product into two tnums, consisting of the value-sum (acc_v) and the
- * mask-sum (acc_m) and then perform tnum addition on them. The following paper
- * explains the algorithm in more detail: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05398.
+/* Perform long multiplication, iterating through the trits in a.
+ * Inside `else if (a.mask & 1)`, instead of simply multiplying b with LSB(a)'s
+ * uncertainty and accumulating directly, we find two possible partial products
+ * (one for LSB(a) = 0 and another for LSB(a) = 1), and add their union to the
+ * accumulator. This addresses an issue pointed out in an open question ("How
+ * can we incorporate correlation in unknown bits across partial products?")
+ * left by Harishankar et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05398), improving
+ * the general precision significantly.
  */
 struct tnum tnum_mul(struct tnum a, struct tnum b)
 {
-	u64 acc_v = a.value * b.value;
-	struct tnum acc_m = TNUM(0, 0);
+	struct tnum acc = TNUM(0, 0);
 
 	while (a.value || a.mask) {
 		/* LSB of tnum a is a certain 1 */
 		if (a.value & 1)
-			acc_m = tnum_add(acc_m, TNUM(0, b.mask));
+			acc = tnum_add(acc, b);
 		/* LSB of tnum a is uncertain */
-		else if (a.mask & 1)
-			acc_m = tnum_add(acc_m, TNUM(0, b.value | b.mask));
+		else if (a.mask & 1) {
+			/* acc += tnum_union(acc_0, acc_1), where acc_0 and
+			 * acc_1 are partial accumulators for cases
+			 * LSB(a) = certain 0 and LSB(a) = certain 1.
+			 * acc_0 = acc + 0 * b = acc.
+			 * acc_1 = acc + 1 * b = tnum_add(acc, b).
+			 */
+
+			acc = tnum_union(acc, tnum_add(acc, b));
+		}
 		/* Note: no case for LSB is certain 0 */
 		a = tnum_rshift(a, 1);
 		b = tnum_lshift(b, 1);
 	}
-	return tnum_add(TNUM(acc_v, 0), acc_m);
+	return acc;
 }
 
 /* Note that if a and b disagree - i.e. one has a 'known 1' where the other has
@@ -155,6 +163,14 @@ struct tnum tnum_intersect(struct tnum a, struct tnum b)
 	return TNUM(v & ~mu, mu);
 }
 
+struct tnum tnum_union(struct tnum a, struct tnum b)
+{
+	u64 v = a.value & b.value;
+	u64 mu = (a.value ^ b.value) | a.mask | b.mask;
+
+	return TNUM(v & ~mu, mu);
+}
+
 struct tnum tnum_cast(struct tnum a, u8 size)
 {
 	a.value &= (1ULL << (size * 8)) - 1;