Causing a divide overflow error (x86)

Question

I have a few questions about divide overflow errors on x86 or x86_64 architecture. Lately I've been reading about integer overflows. Usually, when an arithmetic operation results in an integer overflow, the carry bit or overflow bit in the FLAGS register is set. But apparently, according to this article, overflows resulting from division operations don't set the overflow bit, but rather trigger a hardware exception, similar to when you divide by zero.

Now, integer overflows resulting from division are a lot more rare than say, multiplication. There's only a few ways to even trigger a division overflow. One way would be to do something like:

int16_t a = -32768;
int16_t b = -1;
int16_t c = a / b;

In this case, due to the two's complement representation of signed integers, you can't represent positive 32768 in a signed 16-bit integer, so the division operation overflows, resulting in the erroneous value of -32768.

A few questions:

1) Contrary to what this article says, the above did NOT cause a hardware exception. I'm using an x86_64 machine running Linux, and when I divide by zero the program terminates with a Floating point exception. But when I cause a division overflow, the program continues as usual, silently ignoring the erroneous quotient. So why doesn't this cause a hardware exception?

2) Why are division errors treated so severely by the hardware, as opposed to other arithmetic overflows? Why should a multiplication overflow (which is much more likely to accidentally occur) be silently ignored by the hardware, but a division overflow is supposed to trigger a fatal interrupt?

=========== EDIT ==============

Okay, thanks everyone for the responses. I've gotten responses saying basically that the above 16-bit integer division shouldn't cause a hardware fault because the quotient is still less than the register size. I don't understand this. In this case, the register storing the quotient is 16-bit - which is too small to store signed positive 32768. So why isn't a hardware exception raised?

Okay, let's do this directly in GCC inline assembly and see what happens:

int16_t a = -32768;
int16_t b = -1;

__asm__
(
    "xorw %%dx, %%dx;"            // Clear the DX register (upper-bits of dividend)
    "movw %1, %%ax;"              // Load lower bits of dividend into AX
    "movw %2, %%bx;"              // Load the divisor into BX
    "idivw %%bx;"                 // Divide a / b (quotient is stored in AX)
    "movw %%ax, %0;"              // Copy the quotient into 'b'
    : "=rm"(b)                    // Output list
    :"ir"(a), "rm"(b)             // Input list
    :"%ax", "%dx", "%bx"          // Clobbered registers
);

printf("%d\n", b);

This simply outputs an erroneous value: -32768. Still no hardware exception, even though the register storing the quotient (AX) is too small to fit the quotient. So I don't understand why no hardware fault is raised here.

Answer 1

In C language arithmetic operations are never performed within the types smaller than int. Any time you attempt arithmetic on smaller operands, they are first subjected to integral promotions which convert them to int. If on your platform int is, say, 32-bit wide, then there's no way to force a C program to perform 16-bit division. The compiler will generate 32-bit division instead. This is probably why your C experiment does not produce the expected overflow on division. If your platform does indeed have 32-bit int, then your best bet would be to try the same thing with 32-bit operands (i.e. divide INT_MIN by -1). I'm pretty sure that way you'll be able to eventually reproduce the overflow exception even in C code.

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In your assembly code you are using 16-bit division, since you specified BX as the operand for idiv. 16-bit division on x86 divides the 32-bit dividend stored in DX:AX pair by the idiv operand. This is what you are doing in your code. The DX:AX pair is interpreted as one composite 32-bit register, meaning that the sign bit in this pair is now actually the highest-order bit of DX. The highest-order bit of AX is not a sign bit anymore.

And what you did you do with DX? You simply cleared it. You set it to 0. But with DX set to 0, your dividend is interpreted as positive! From the machine point of view, such a DX:AX pair actually represents a positive value +32768. I.e. in your assembly-language experiment you are dividing +32768 by -1. And the result is -32768, as it should be. Nothing unusual here.

If you want to represent -32768 in the DX:AX pair, you have to sign-extend it, i.e. you have to fill DX with all-one bit pattern, instead of zeros. Instead of doing xor DX, DX you should have initialized AX with your -32768 and then done cwd. That would have sign-extended AX into DX.

For example, in my experiment (not GCC) this code

__asm  {
  mov AX, -32768
  cwd
  mov BX, -1
  idiv BX
}

causes the expected exception, because it does indeed attempt to divide -32768 by -1.