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author | Yann Collet <yann.collet.73@gmail.com> | 2014-11-30 23:53:20 (GMT) |
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committer | Yann Collet <yann.collet.73@gmail.com> | 2014-11-30 23:53:20 (GMT) |
commit | 9523101aff2f7d38572b22b522430b9af39df873 (patch) | |
tree | 44470cc5bbb84b8275d75209e4d8180f4d97da46 /lz4_block_format.txt | |
parent | 989346b75eb82f1d3504bec82e4ede77c11d5711 (diff) | |
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Clarified some file names
Diffstat (limited to 'lz4_block_format.txt')
-rw-r--r-- | lz4_block_format.txt | 120 |
1 files changed, 120 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/lz4_block_format.txt b/lz4_block_format.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2c424c5 --- /dev/null +++ b/lz4_block_format.txt @@ -0,0 +1,120 @@ +LZ4 Format Description +Last revised: 2012-02-27 +Author : Y. Collet + + + +This small specification intents to provide enough information +to anyone willing to produce LZ4-compatible compressed data blocks +using any programming language. + +LZ4 is an LZ77-type compressor with a fixed, byte-oriented encoding. +The most important design principle behind LZ4 is simplicity. +It helps to create an easy to read and maintain source code. +It also helps later on for optimisations, compactness, and speed. +There is no entropy encoder backend nor framing layer. +The latter is assumed to be handled by other parts of the system. + +This document only describes the format, +not how the LZ4 compressor nor decompressor actually work. +The correctness of the decompressor should not depend +on implementation details of the compressor, and vice versa. + + + +-- Compressed block format -- + +An LZ4 compressed block is composed of sequences. +Schematically, a sequence is a suite of literals, followed by a match copy. + +Each sequence starts with a token. +The token is a one byte value, separated into two 4-bits fields. +Therefore each field ranges from 0 to 15. + + +The first field uses the 4 high-bits of the token. +It provides the length of literals to follow. +(Note : a literal is a not-compressed byte). +If the field value is 0, then there is no literal. +If it is 15, then we need to add some more bytes to indicate the full length. +Each additionnal byte then represent a value from 0 to 255, +which is added to the previous value to produce a total length. +When the byte value is 255, another byte is output. +There can be any number of bytes following the token. There is no "size limit". +(Sidenote this is why a not-compressible input block is expanded by 0.4%). + +Example 1 : A length of 48 will be represented as : +- 15 : value for the 4-bits High field +- 33 : (=48-15) remaining length to reach 48 + +Example 2 : A length of 280 will be represented as : +- 15 : value for the 4-bits High field +- 255 : following byte is maxed, since 280-15 >= 255 +- 10 : (=280 - 15 - 255) ) remaining length to reach 280 + +Example 3 : A length of 15 will be represented as : +- 15 : value for the 4-bits High field +- 0 : (=15-15) yes, the zero must be output + +Following the token and optional length bytes, are the literals themselves. +They are exactly as numerous as previously decoded (length of literals). +It's possible that there are zero literal. + + +Following the literals is the match copy operation. + +It starts by the offset. +This is a 2 bytes value, in little endian format. + +The offset represents the position of the match to be copied from. +1 means "current position - 1 byte". +The maximum offset value is 65535, 65536 cannot be coded. +Note that 0 is an invalid value, not used. + +Then we need to extract the match length. +For this, we use the second token field, the low 4-bits. +Value, obviously, ranges from 0 to 15. +However here, 0 means that the copy operation will be minimal. +The minimum length of a match, called minmatch, is 4. +As a consequence, a 0 value means 4 bytes, and a value of 15 means 19+ bytes. +Similar to literal length, on reaching the highest possible value (15), +we output additional bytes, one at a time, with values ranging from 0 to 255. +They are added to total to provide the final match length. +A 255 value means there is another byte to read and add. +There is no limit to the number of optional bytes that can be output this way. +(This points towards a maximum achievable compression ratio of ~250). + +With the offset and the matchlength, +the decoder can now proceed to copy the data from the already decoded buffer. +On decoding the matchlength, we reach the end of the compressed sequence, +and therefore start another one. + + +-- Parsing restrictions -- + +There are specific parsing rules to respect in order to remain compatible +with assumptions made by the decoder : +1) The last 5 bytes are always literals +2) The last match must start at least 12 bytes before end of block +Consequently, a block with less than 13 bytes cannot be compressed. +These rules are in place to ensure that the decoder +will never read beyond the input buffer, nor write beyond the output buffer. + +Note that the last sequence is also incomplete, +and stops right after literals. + + +-- Additional notes -- + +There is no assumption nor limits to the way the compressor +searches and selects matches within the source data block. +It could be a fast scan, a multi-probe, a full search using BST, +standard hash chains or MMC, well whatever. + +Advanced parsing strategies can also be implemented, such as lazy match, +or full optimal parsing. + +All these trade-off offer distinctive speed/memory/compression advantages. +Whatever the method used by the compressor, its result will be decodable +by any LZ4 decoder if it follows the format specification described above. + |