Subject: Re: XDL_FAST_HASH can be very slow

From: Thomas Rast <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:48:31 +0100

Patrick Reynolds <[email-masked]> writes:

> The original xdl_hash_record is essentially DJB hash, which does a
> multiplication, load, and xor for each byte of the input.  Commit
> 6942efc introduces an "XDL_FAST_HASH" version of the same function
> that is clearly inspired by the DJB hash, but it does only one
> multiplication, load, and xor for each 8 bytes of input -- i.e., fewer
> loads, but also a lot less bit mixing.  Less mixing means far more
> collisions, leading to the performance problems with evil-icons.  It's
> not clear to me if the XDL_FAST_HASH version intended to match the
> output of the DJB hash function, but it doesn't at all.

Note that XDL_FAST_HASH is just a ripoff of the hashing scheme that
Linus socially engineered on G+ around that time.  I didn't do any of
the hash genealogy that you did here, and it now shows.  The orginal
patches are linked from 6942efc (xdiff: load full words in the inner loop of
xdl_hash_record, 2012-04-06):

  https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/2/452
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/5/6

The code still exists:

  https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/namei.c#L1678

> I have implemented two simpler possibilities, both of which fix the
> problems diffing the evil-icons repository:

I think it would be best to separate three goals here:

1. hash function throughput
2. quality of the hash values
3. avoiding collision attacks

XDL_FAST_HASH was strictly an attempt to improve throughput, and fairly
successful at that (6942efc (xdiff: load full words in the inner loop of
xdl_hash_record, 2012-04-06) quotes an 8% improvement on 'git log -p').

You are now addressing quality.

I have no idea how you ran into this, but if you are reworking things
already, I think it would be good to also randomize whatever hash you
put in so as to give some measure of protection against collision
attacks.

> 1. An XDL_FAST_HASH implementation that matches the output of the DJB
> hash exactly.  Its performance is basically the same as DJB, because
> the only thing is does differently is load 8 bytes at a time instead
> of 1.  It does all the same ALU operations as DJB.

I don't think there's a point in having such a function, since it would
mean a lot of code for no throughput gain.  Let's just remove
XDL_FAST_HASH and the original hashing scheme in favor of a better hash
function.

-- 
Thomas Rast
[email-masked]