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11. Compression algorithm (deflate)
2
3The deflation algorithm used by zlib (also zip and gzip) is a variation of
4LZ77 (Lempel-Ziv 1977, see reference below). It finds duplicated strings in
5the input data. The second occurrence of a string is replaced by a
6pointer to the previous string, in the form of a pair (distance,
7length). Distances are limited to 32K bytes, and lengths are limited
8to 258 bytes. When a string does not occur anywhere in the previous
932K bytes, it is emitted as a sequence of literal bytes. (In this
10description, `string' must be taken as an arbitrary sequence of bytes,
11and is not restricted to printable characters.)
12
13Literals or match lengths are compressed with one Huffman tree, and
14match distances are compressed with another tree. The trees are stored
15in a compact form at the start of each block. The blocks can have any
16size (except that the compressed data for one block must fit in
17available memory). A block is terminated when deflate() determines that
18it would be useful to start another block with fresh trees. (This is
19somewhat similar to the behavior of LZW-based _compress_.)
20
21Duplicated strings are found using a hash table. All input strings of
22length 3 are inserted in the hash table. A hash index is computed for
23the next 3 bytes. If the hash chain for this index is not empty, all
24strings in the chain are compared with the current input string, and
25the longest match is selected.
26
27The hash chains are searched starting with the most recent strings, to
28favor small distances and thus take advantage of the Huffman encoding.
29The hash chains are singly linked. There are no deletions from the
30hash chains, the algorithm simply discards matches that are too old.
31
32To avoid a worst-case situation, very long hash chains are arbitrarily
33truncated at a certain length, determined by a runtime option (level
34parameter of deflateInit). So deflate() does not always find the longest
35possible match but generally finds a match which is long enough.
36
37deflate() also defers the selection of matches with a lazy evaluation
38mechanism. After a match of length N has been found, deflate() searches for a
39longer match at the next input byte. If a longer match is found, the
40previous match is truncated to a length of one (thus producing a single
41literal byte) and the longer match is emitted afterwards. Otherwise,
42the original match is kept, and the next match search is attempted only
43N steps later.
44
45The lazy match evaluation is also subject to a runtime parameter. If
46the current match is long enough, deflate() reduces the search for a longer
47match, thus speeding up the whole process. If compression ratio is more
48important than speed, deflate() attempts a complete second search even if
49the first match is already long enough.
50
51The lazy match evaluation is not performed for the fastest compression
52modes (level parameter 1 to 3). For these fast modes, new strings
53are inserted in the hash table only when no match was found, or
54when the match is not too long. This degrades the compression ratio
55but saves time since there are both fewer insertions and fewer searches.
56
57
582. Decompression algorithm (inflate)
59
60The real question is, given a Huffman tree, how to decode fast. The most
61important realization is that shorter codes are much more common than
62longer codes, so pay attention to decoding the short codes fast, and let
63the long codes take longer to decode.
64
65inflate() sets up a first level table that covers some number of bits of
66input less than the length of longest code. It gets that many bits from the
67stream, and looks it up in the table. The table will tell if the next
68code is that many bits or less and how many, and if it is, it will tell
69the value, else it will point to the next level table for which inflate()
70grabs more bits and tries to decode a longer code.
71
72How many bits to make the first lookup is a tradeoff between the time it
73takes to decode and the time it takes to build the table. If building the
74table took no time (and if you had infinite memory), then there would only
75be a first level table to cover all the way to the longest code. However,
76building the table ends up taking a lot longer for more bits since short
77codes are replicated many times in such a table. What inflate() does is
78simply to make the number of bits in the first table a variable, and set it
79for the maximum speed.
80
81inflate() sends new trees relatively often, so it is possibly set for a
82smaller first level table than an application that has only one tree for
83all the data. For inflate, which has 286 possible codes for the
84literal/length tree, the size of the first table is nine bits. Also the
85distance trees have 30 possible values, and the size of the first table is
86six bits. Note that for each of those cases, the table ended up one bit
87longer than the ``average'' code length, i.e. the code length of an
88approximately flat code which would be a little more than eight bits for
89286 symbols and a little less than five bits for 30 symbols. It would be
90interesting to see if optimizing the first level table for other
91applications gave values within a bit or two of the flat code size.
92
93
94Jean-loup Gailly Mark Adler
95gzip@prep.ai.mit.edu madler@alumni.caltech.edu
96
97
98References:
99
100[LZ77] Ziv J., Lempel A., ``A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data
101Compression,'' IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 23, No. 3,
102pp. 337-343.
103
104``DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification'' available in
105ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1951.txt