[PATCH] sched/cputime: Drop now-stale mul_u64_u64_div_u64() over-approximation guard

From: Nicolas Pitre

Date: Thu May 14 2026 - 16:26:37 EST


Commit 77baa5bafcbe ("sched/cputime: Fix mul_u64_u64_div_u64() precision
for cputime") added a clamp in cputime_adjust():

if (unlikely(stime > rtime))
stime = rtime;

The justification was that mul_u64_u64_div_u64() could over-approximate
on some architectures (notably arm64 and the old 32-bit fallback), so
the mathematically impossible stime > rtime was nevertheless reachable
and would underflow utime = rtime - stime.

That premise no longer holds. Commit b29a62d87cc0 ("mul_u64_u64_div_u64:
make it precise always") replaced the fallback implementation with an
exact 128-bit long division, and the x86_64 inline asm already produced
exact results. The helper now returns the mathematically correct
floor(a*b/d) on every architecture, so stime <= rtime is guaranteed by
stime <= stime + utime and the clamp is dead code.

Remove it along with its stale comment.

Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@xxxxxxxxxxx>
---
kernel/sched/cputime.c | 6 ------
1 file changed, 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/kernel/sched/cputime.c b/kernel/sched/cputime.c
index fbf31db0d2f3..6e85023a81ff 100644
--- a/kernel/sched/cputime.c
+++ b/kernel/sched/cputime.c
@@ -587,12 +587,6 @@ void cputime_adjust(struct task_cputime *curr, struct prev_cputime *prev,
}

stime = mul_u64_u64_div_u64(stime, rtime, stime + utime);
- /*
- * Because mul_u64_u64_div_u64() can approximate on some
- * achitectures; enforce the constraint that: a*b/(b+c) <= a.
- */
- if (unlikely(stime > rtime))
- stime = rtime;

update:
/*
--
2.54.0