Find first set

rdf:langString Find first set

rdf:langString y

rdf:langString January 2020

rdf:langString "nb"

rdf:langString In computer software and hardware, find first set (ffs) or find first one is a bit operation that, given an unsigned machine word, designates the index or position of the least significant bit set to one in the word counting from the least significant bit position. A nearly equivalent operation is count trailing zeros (ctz) or number of trailing zeros (ntz), which counts the number of zero bits following the least significant one bit. The complementary operation that finds the index or position of the most significant set bit is log base 2, so called because it computes the binary logarithm ⌊log2(x)⌋. This is to count leading zeros (clz) or number of leading zeros (nlz), which counts the number of zero bits preceding the most significant one bit.There are two common variants of find first set, the POSIX definition which starts indexing of bits at 1, herein labelled ffs, and the variant which starts indexing of bits at zero, which is equivalent to ctz and so will be called by that name. Most modern CPU instruction set architectures provide one or more of these as hardware operators; software emulation is usually provided for any that aren't available, either as compiler intrinsics or in system libraries.