Adds xxhash kernel module with xxh32 and xxh64 hashes. xxhash is an
extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm for checksumming.
The zstd compression and decompression modules added in the next patch
require xxhash. I extracted it out from zstd since it is useful on its
own. I copied the code from the upstream XXHash source repository and
translated it into kernel style. I ran benchmarks and tests in the kernel
and tests in userland.
I benchmarked xxhash as a special character device. I ran in four modes,
no-op, xxh32, xxh64, and crc32. The no-op mode simply copies the data to
kernel space and ignores it. The xxh32, xxh64, and crc32 modes compute
hashes on the copied data. I also ran it with four different buffer sizes.
The benchmark file is located in the upstream zstd source repository under
`contrib/linux-kernel/xxhash_test.c` [1].
I ran the benchmarks on a Ubuntu 14.04 VM with 2 cores and 4 GiB of RAM.
The VM is running on a MacBook Pro with a 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7 processor,
16 GB of RAM, and a SSD. I benchmarked using the file `filesystem.squashfs`
from `ubuntu-16.10-desktop-amd64.iso`, which is 1,536,217,088 B large.
Run the following commands for the benchmark:
modprobe xxhash_test
mknod xxhash_test c 245 0
time cp filesystem.squashfs xxhash_test
The time is reported by the time of the userland `cp`.
The GB/s is computed with
1,536,217,008 B / time(buffer size, hash)
which includes the time to copy from userland.
The Normalized GB/s is computed with
1,536,217,088 B / (time(buffer size, hash) - time(buffer size, none)).
Tested in userland using the test-suite in the zstd repo under
`contrib/linux-kernel/test/XXHashUserlandTest.cpp` [2] by mocking the
kernel functions. A line in each branch of every function in `xxhash.c`
was commented out to ensure that the test-suite fails. Additionally
tested while testing zstd and with SMHasher [3].