hashfile: allow skipping the hash function

The hashfile API is useful for generating files that include a trailing
hash of the file's contents up to that point. Using such a hash is
helpful for verifying the file for corruption-at-rest, such as a faulty
drive causing flipped bits.

Git's index file includes this trailing hash, so it uses a 'struct
hashfile' to handle the I/O to the file. This was very convenient to
allow using the hashfile methods during these operations.

However, hashing the file contents during write comes at a performance
penalty. It's slower to hash the bytes on their way to the disk than
without that step. This problem is made worse by the replacement of
hardware-accelerated SHA1 computations with the software-based sha1dc
computation.

This write cost is significant, and the checksum capability is likely
not worth that cost for such a short-lived file. The index is rewritten
frequently and the only time the checksum is checked is during 'git
fsck'. Thus, it would be helpful to allow a user to opt-out of the hash
computation.

We first need to allow Git to opt-out of the hash computation in the
hashfile API. The buffered writes of the API are still helpful, so it
makes sense to make the change here.

Introduce a new 'skip_hash' option to 'struct hashfile'. When set, the
update_fn and final_fn members of the_hash_algo are skipped. When
finalizing the hashfile, the trailing hash is replaced with the null
hash.

This use of a trailing null hash would be desireable in either case,
since we do not want to special case a file format to have a different
length depending on whether it was hashed or not. When the final bytes
of a file are all zero, we can infer that it was written without
hashing, and thus that verification is not available as a check for file
consistency. This also means that we could easily toggle hashing for any
file format we desire.

A version of this patch has existed in the microsoft/git fork since
2017 [1] (the linked commit was rebased in 2018, but the original dates
back to January 2017). Here, the change to make the index use this fast
path is delayed until a later change.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/git/commit/21fed2d91410f45d85279467f21d717a2db45201

Co-authored-by: Kevin Willford <kewillf@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Willford <kewillf@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <derrickstolee@github.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/csum-file.h b/csum-file.h
index 0d29f528fb..793a59da12 100644
--- a/csum-file.h
+++ b/csum-file.h
@@ -20,6 +20,13 @@ struct hashfile {
 	size_t buffer_len;
 	unsigned char *buffer;
 	unsigned char *check_buffer;
+
+	/**
+	 * If non-zero, skip_hash indicates that we should
+	 * not actually compute the hash for this hashfile and
+	 * instead only use it as a buffered write.
+	 */
+	int skip_hash;
 };
 
 /* Checkpoint */