summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/lib/bsearch.c
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorTim Abbott <tabbott@ksplice.com>2011-04-14 20:00:19 +0200
committerRusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>2011-05-19 16:55:27 +0930
commit1a94dc35bc5c166d89913dc01a49d27a3c21a455 (patch)
tree575196f1d0b9528b7d63b9bff692dd81e1aeac0f /lib/bsearch.c
parentf02e8a6596b7dc9b2171f7ff5654039ef0950cdc (diff)
lib: Add generic binary search function to the kernel.
There a large number hand-coded binary searches in the kernel (run "git grep search | grep binary" to find many of them). Since in my experience, hand-coding binary searches can be error-prone, it seems worth cleaning this up by providing a generic binary search function. This generic binary search implementation comes from Ksplice. It has the same basic API as the C library bsearch() function. Ksplice uses it in half a dozen places with 4 different comparison functions, and I think our code is substantially cleaner because of this. Signed-off-by: Tim Abbott <tabbott@ksplice.com> Extra-bikeshedding-by: Alan Jenkins <alan-jenkins@tuffmail.co.uk> Extra-bikeshedding-by: André Goddard Rosa <andre.goddard@gmail.com> Extra-bikeshedding-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> Signed-off-by: Alessio Igor Bogani <abogani@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Diffstat (limited to 'lib/bsearch.c')
-rw-r--r--lib/bsearch.c53
1 files changed, 53 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/lib/bsearch.c b/lib/bsearch.c
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..5b54758e2af
--- /dev/null
+++ b/lib/bsearch.c
@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
+/*
+ * A generic implementation of binary search for the Linux kernel
+ *
+ * Copyright (C) 2008-2009 Ksplice, Inc.
+ * Author: Tim Abbott <tabbott@ksplice.com>
+ *
+ * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
+ * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
+ * published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2.
+ */
+
+#include <linux/module.h>
+#include <linux/bsearch.h>
+
+/*
+ * bsearch - binary search an array of elements
+ * @key: pointer to item being searched for
+ * @base: pointer to first element to search
+ * @num: number of elements
+ * @size: size of each element
+ * @cmp: pointer to comparison function
+ *
+ * This function does a binary search on the given array. The
+ * contents of the array should already be in ascending sorted order
+ * under the provided comparison function.
+ *
+ * Note that the key need not have the same type as the elements in
+ * the array, e.g. key could be a string and the comparison function
+ * could compare the string with the struct's name field. However, if
+ * the key and elements in the array are of the same type, you can use
+ * the same comparison function for both sort() and bsearch().
+ */
+void *bsearch(const void *key, const void *base, size_t num, size_t size,
+ int (*cmp)(const void *key, const void *elt))
+{
+ size_t start = 0, end = num;
+ int result;
+
+ while (start < end) {
+ size_t mid = start + (end - start) / 2;
+
+ result = cmp(key, base + mid * size);
+ if (result < 0)
+ end = mid;
+ else if (result > 0)
+ start = mid + 1;
+ else
+ return (void *)base + mid * size;
+ }
+
+ return NULL;
+}
+EXPORT_SYMBOL(bsearch);