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>
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