There were 2 competing set of debug functions
within zstd_internal.h and bitstream.h.
They were mostly duplicate, and required care to avoid messing with each other.
There is now a single implementation, shared by both.
Significant change :
The macro variable ZSTD_DEBUG does no longer exist,
it has been replaced by DEBUGLEVEL,
which required modifying several source files.
removed "cached" structure.
prices are now saved in the optimal table.
Primarily done for simplification.
Might improve speed by a little.
But actually, and surprisingly, also improves ratio in some circumstances.
ensure that, when frequency[symbol]==0,
result is (tableLog + 1) bits
with both upper-bit and fractional-bit estimates.
Also : enable BIT_DEBUG in /tests
This edge case is only possible with the new optimal encoding selector,
since before zstd would always choose `set_basic` for small numbers of
sequences.
Fix `FSE_readNCount()` to support buffers < 4 bytes.
Credit to OSS-Fuzz
Estimate the cost for using FSE modes `set_basic`, `set_compressed`, and
`set_repeat`, and select the one with the lowest cost.
* The cost of `set_basic` is computed using the cross-entropy cost
function `ZSTD_crossEntropyCost()`, using the normalized default count
and the count.
* The cost of `set_repeat` is computed using `FSE_bitCost()`. We check the
previous table to see if it is able to represent the distribution.
* The cost of `set_compressed` is computed with the entropy cost function
`ZSTD_entropyCost()`, together with the cost of writing the normalized
count `ZSTD_NCountCost()`.
for FSE symbols.
While it seems to work, the gains are negligible compared to rough maxNbBits evaluation.
There are even a few losses sometimes, that still need to be explained.
Furthermode, there are still cases where btlazy2 does a better job than btopt,
which seems rather strange too.
for proper estimation of symbol's weights
when using dictionary compression.
Note : using only huffman costs is not good enough,
presumably because sequence symbol costs are incorrect.
* Expose the reference external sequences API for zstdmt.
Allows external sequences of any length, which get split when necessary.
* Reset the LDM window when the context is reset.
* Store the maximum number of LDM sequences.
* Sequence generation now returns the number of last literals.
* Fix sequence generation to not throw out the last literals when blocks of
more than 1 MB are encountered.
* Replaced a non-breaking space and an en dash with a plain space and
a hyphen.
* This means the files are simple ASCII and less likely to run into
codepage issues.
clang only claims compatibility with gcc 4.2.
Consequently, recent patch which reserved DYNAMIC_BMI2 for gcc >= 4.8
also disabled it for clang.
fix : __clang__ is now enough to enable DYNAMIC_BMI2
(associated with other existing conditions : x64/x64, !bmi2)
Update code documentation, and properly names a few "magic constants".
Also, HUF_compress_internal() gets a cleaner way
to determine size of tables inside workspace.
* `ZSTD_ldm_generateSequences()` generates the LDM sequences and
stores them in a table. It should work with any chunk size, but
is currently only called one block at a time.
* `ZSTD_ldm_blockCompress()` emits the pre-defined sequences, and
instead of encoding the literals directly, it passes them to a
secondary block compressor. The code to handle chunk sizes greater
than the block size is currently commented out, since it is unused.
The next PR will uncomment exercise this code.
* During optimal parsing, ensure LDM `minMatchLength` is at least
`targetLength`. Also don't emit repcode matches in the LDM block
compressor. Enabling the LDM with the optimal parser now actually improves
the compression ratio.
* The compression ratio is very similar to before. It is very slightly
different, because the repcode handling is slightly different. If I remove
immediate repcode checking in both branches the compressed size is exactly
the same.
* The speed looks to be the same or better than before.
Up Next (in a separate PR)
--------------------------
Allow sequence generation to happen prior to compression, and produce more
than a block worth of sequences. Expose some API for zstdmt to consume.
This will test out some currently untested code in
`ZSTD_ldm_blockCompress()`.
Pathological samples may result in literal section being incompressible.
This case is now detected,
and literal distribution is replaced by one that can be written into the dictionary.
The deep fuzzer tests caught a subtle bug that was probably there for a long time.
The impact of the bug is not a crash, or any other clear error signal,
rather, it reduces performance, by cutting data into smaller blocks.
Eventually, the following test would fail because it produces too many 1-byte blocks,
requiring more space than buffer can provide :
`./zstreamtest_asan --mt -s3514 -t1678312 -i1678314`
The root scenario is as follows :
- Create context, initialize it using explicit parameters or a `cdict` to pin them down, set `pledgedSrcSize=1`
- The compression parameters will not be adapted, but `windowSize` and `blockSize` will be automatically set to `1`.
`windowSize` and `blockSize` are dynamic values, set within `ZSTD_resetCCtx_internal()`.
The automatic adaptation makes it possible to generate smaller contexts for smaller input sizes.
- Complete compression
- New compression with same context, using same parameters, but `pledgedSrcSize=ZSTD_CONTENTSIZE_UNKNOWN`
trigger "continue mode"
- Continue mode doesn't modify blockSize, because it used to depend on `windowLog` only,
but in fact, it also depends on `pledgedSrcSize`.
- The "old" blocksize (1) is still there,
next compression will use this value to cut input into blocks,
resulting in more blocks and worse performance than necessary performance.
Given the scenario, and its possible variants, I'm surprised it did not show up before.
But I suspect it did show up, it's just that it never triggered an error, because "worse performance" is not a trigger.
The above test is a special corner case, where performance is so impacted that it reaches an error case.
The fix works, but I'm not completely pleased.
I think the current code relies too much on implied relations between variables.
This will likely break again in the future when some related part of the code change.
Unfortunately, no time to make larger changes if we want to keep the release target for zstd v1.3.3.
So a longer term fix will have to be considered after the release.
To do : create a reliable test case which triggers this scenario for CI tests.
There was a flaw in the formula
which compared literal cost with match cost :
at a given position,
a non-null literal suite is going to be part of next sequence,
while if position ends a previous match, to immediately start another match,
next sequence will have a litlength of zero.
A litlength of zero has a non-null cost.
It follows that literals cost should be compared to match cost + litlength==0.
Not doing so gave a structural advantage to matches, which would be selected more often.
I believe that's what led to the creation of the strange heuristic which added a complex cost to matches.
The heuristic was actually compensating.
It was probably created through multiple trials, settling for best outcome on a given scenario (I suspect silesia.tar).
The problem with this heuristic is that it's hard to understand,
and unfortunately, any future change in the parser would impact the way it should be calculated and its effects.
The "proper" formula makes it possible to remove this heuristic.
Now, the problem is : in a head to head comparison, it's sometimes better, sometimes worse.
Note that all differences are small (< 0.01 ratio).
In general, the newer formula is better for smaller files (for example, calgary.tar and enwik7).
I suspect that's because starting statistics are pretty poor (another area of improvement).
However, for silesia.tar specifically, it's worse at level 22 (while being better at level 17, so even compression level has an impact ...).
It's a pity that zstd -22 gets worse on silesia.tar.
That being said, I like that the new code gets rid of strange variables,
which were introducing complexity for any future evolution (faster variants being in mind).
Therefore, in spite of this detrimental side effect, I tend to be in favor of it.