Documentation: changed-path Bloom filters use byte words

In Documentation/technical/commit-graph-format.txt, the definition
of the BIDX chunk specifies the length is a number of 8-byte words.
During development we discovered that using 8-byte words in the
Murmur3 hash algorithm causes issues with big-endian versus little-
endian machines. Thus, the hash algorithm was adapted to work on a
byte-by-byte basis. However, this caused a change in the definition
of a "word" in bloom.h. Now, a "word" is a single byte, which allows
filters to be as small as two bytes. These length-two filters are
demonstrated in t0095-bloom.sh, and a larger filter of length 25 is
demonstrated as well.

The original point of using 8-byte words was for alignment reasons.
It also presented opportunities for extremely sparse Bloom filters
when there were a small number of changes at a commit, creating a
very low false-positive rate. However, modifying the format at this
point is unlikely to be a valuable exercise. Also, this use of
single-byte granularity does present opportunities to save space.
It is unclear if 8-byte alignment of the filters would present any
meaningful performance benefits.

Modify the format document to reflect reality.

Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This commit is contained in:
Derrick Stolee 2020-05-11 11:56:11 +00:00 committed by Junio C Hamano
parent 891c17c954
commit 88093289cd

View file

@ -97,10 +97,10 @@ CHUNK DATA:
bit on. The other bits correspond to the position of the last parent.
Bloom Filter Index (ID: {'B', 'I', 'D', 'X'}) (N * 4 bytes) [Optional]
* The ith entry, BIDX[i], stores the number of 8-byte word blocks in all
Bloom filters from commit 0 to commit i (inclusive) in lexicographic
order. The Bloom filter for the i-th commit spans from BIDX[i-1] to
BIDX[i] (plus header length), where BIDX[-1] is 0.
* The ith entry, BIDX[i], stores the number of bytes in all Bloom filters
from commit 0 to commit i (inclusive) in lexicographic order. The Bloom
filter for the i-th commit spans from BIDX[i-1] to BIDX[i] (plus header
length), where BIDX[-1] is 0.
* The BIDX chunk is ignored if the BDAT chunk is not present.
Bloom Filter Data (ID: {'B', 'D', 'A', 'T'}) [Optional]