DeltaIndex is a simple pack style delta generator. The function works
by creating a compact index of a source buffer's blocks, and then
walking a sliding window along a desired result buffer, searching for
the window in the index. When a match is found, the window is
stretched to the longest possible length that is common with the
source buffer, and a copy instruction is created.
Rabin's polynomial hash function is used to compute the hash for a
block, permitting efficient sliding of the window in single byte
increments. The update function to slide one byte originated from
David Mazieres' work in LBFS, and our implementation of the update
step was certainly inspired by the initial work Geert Bosch proposed
for C Git in http://marc.info/?l=git&m=114565424620771&w=2.
To ensure the encoder runs in linear time with respect to the size of
the two input buffers (source and result), the maximum number of
blocks that can share the same position in the index's hashtable is
capped at a constant number. This prevents bad inputs from causing
the encoder to run in quadratic time, but comes with a penalty of
creating a longer delta due to fewer considered copy positions.
Strange hackery is used to cap the amount of memory used by the index
to be no more than 12 bytes for every 16 bytes of source buffer, no
matter what the JVM per-object overhead is. This permits an index to
always be no larger than 1.75x the source buffer length, which is an
important feature to support large windows of candidates to match
against while packing. Here the strange hackery is nothing more than
a manually managed chained hashtable, where pointers are array indexes
into storage arrays rather than object references.
Computation of the hash function for a single fixed sized block is
done through an unrolled loop, where the first 4 iterations have been
manually reduced down to eliminate unnecessary instructions. The
pattern is derived from ObjectId.equals(byte[], int, byte[], int),
where we have unrolled the loop required to compare two 20 byte
arrays. Hours of testing with the Sun 1.6 JRE concluded that the
non-obvious "foo[idx + 1]" style of reference is faster than
"foo[idx++]", and so that is what we use here during hashing.
Change-Id: If9fb2a1524361bc701405920560d8ae752221768
Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Shawn O. Pearce
8612c0ace1