I'm storing the IP address in sockaddr_in6
which supports an array of four 32-bit, addr[4]. Essentially a 128 bit number.
I'm trying to calculate number of IPs in a given IPv6 range (how many IPs between). So it's a matter of subtracting one from another using two arrays with a length of four.
The problem is since there's no 128bit data type, I can't convert into decimal.
Thanks a ton!
You could use some kind of big-int library (if you can tolerate LGPL, GMP is the choice). Fortunately, 128 bit subtraction is easy to simulate by hand if necessary. Here is a quick and dirty demonstration of computing the absolute value of (a-b), for 128 bit values:
#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
struct U128
{
unsigned long long hi;
unsigned long long lo;
};
bool subtract(U128& a, U128 b)
{
unsigned long long carry = b.lo > a.lo;
a.lo -= b.lo;
unsigned long long carry2 = b.hi > a.hi || a.hi == b.hi && carry;
a.hi -= carry;
a.hi -= b.hi;
return carry2 != 0;
}
int main()
{
U128 ipAddressA = { 45345, 345345 };
U128 ipAddressB = { 45345, 345346 };
bool carry = subtract(ipAddressA, ipAddressB);
// Carry being set means that we underflowed; that ipAddressB was > ipAddressA.
// Lets just compute 0 - ipAddressA as a means to calculate the negation
// (0-x) of our current value. This gives us the absolute value of the
// difference.
if (carry)
{
ipAddressB = ipAddressA;
ipAddressA = { 0, 0 };
subtract(ipAddressA, ipAddressB);
}
// Print gigantic hex string of the 128-bit value
std::cout.fill ('0');
std::cout << std::hex << std::setw(16) << ipAddressA.hi << std::setw(16) << ipAddressA.lo << std::endl;
}
This gives you the absolute value of the difference. If the range is not huge (64 bits or less), then ipAddressA.lo
can be your answer as a simple unsigned long long
.
If you have perf concerns, you can make use of compiler intrinsics for taking advantage of certain architectures, such as amd64 if you want it to be optimal on that processor. _subborrow_u64
is the amd64 intrinsic for the necessary subtraction work.
The in6_addr
structure stores the address in network byte order - or 'big endian' - with the most significant byte @ s6_addr[0]
. You can't count on the other union members being consistently named, or defined. Even If you accessed the union through a (non-portable) uint32_t
field, the values would have to be converted with ntohl
. So a portable method of finding the difference needs some work.
You can convert the in6_addr
to uint64_t[2]
. Sticking with typical 'bignum' conventions, we use [0] for the low 64-bits and [1] for the high 64-bits:
static inline void
in6_to_u64 (uint64_t dst[2], const struct in6_addr *src)
{
uint64_t hi = 0, lo = 0;
for (unsigned int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
{
hi = (hi << 8) | src->s6_addr[i];
lo = (lo << 8) | src->s6_addr[i + 8];
}
dst[0] = lo, dst[1] = hi;
}
and the difference:
static inline unsigned int
u64_diff (uint64_t d[2], const uint64_t x[2], const uint64_t y[2])
{
unsigned int b = 0, bi;
for (unsigned int i = 0; i < 2; i++)
{
uint64_t di, xi, yi, tmp;
xi = x[i], yi = y[i];
tmp = xi - yi;
di = tmp - b, bi = tmp > xi;
d[i] = di, b = bi | (di > tmp);
}
return b; /* borrow flag = (x < y) */
}