git/Documentation/gitformat-loose.adoc
brian m. carlson ca05bfbae0 rust: add a new binary object map format
Our current loose object format has a few problems.  First, it is not
efficient: the list of object IDs is not sorted and even if it were,
there would not be an efficient way to look up objects in both
algorithms.

Second, we need to store mappings for things which are not technically
loose objects but are not packed objects, either, and so cannot be
stored in a pack index.  These kinds of things include shallows, their
parents, and their trees, as well as submodules. Yet we also need to
implement a sensible way to store the kind of object so that we can
prune unneeded entries.  For instance, if the user has updated the
shallows, we can remove the old values.

For these reasons, introduce a new binary object map format.  The
careful reader will notice that it resembles very closely the pack index
v3 format.  Add an in-memory object map as well, and allow writing to a
batched map, which can then be written later as one of the binary object
maps.  Include several tests for round tripping and data lookup across
algorithms.

Note that the use of this code elsewhere in Git will involve some C code
and some C-compatible code in Rust that will be introduced in a future
commit.  Thus, for example, we ignore the fact that if there is no
current batch and the caller asks for data to be written, this code does
nothing, mostly because this code also does not involve itself with
opening or manipulating files.  The C code that we will add later will
implement this functionality at a higher level and take care of this,
since the code which is necessary for writing to the object store is
deeply involved with our C abstractions and it would require extensive
work (which would not be especially valuable at this point) to port
those to Rust.

Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2025-11-17 14:24:16 -08:00

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gitformat-loose(5)
==================
NAME
----
gitformat-loose - Git loose object format
SYNOPSIS
--------
[verse]
$GIT_DIR/objects/[0-9a-f][0-9a-f]/*
$GIT_DIR/objects/object-map/map-*.map
DESCRIPTION
-----------
Loose objects are how Git stores individual objects, where every object is
written as a separate file.
Over the lifetime of a repository, objects are usually written as loose objects
initially. Eventually, these loose objects will be compacted into packfiles
via repository maintenance to improve disk space usage and speed up the lookup
of these objects.
== Loose objects
Each loose object contains a prefix, followed immediately by the data of the
object. The prefix contains `<type> <size>\0`. `<type>` is one of `blob`,
`tree`, `commit`, or `tag` and `size` is the size of the data (without the
prefix) as a decimal integer expressed in ASCII.
The entire contents, prefix and data concatenated, is then compressed with zlib
and the compressed data is stored in the file. The object ID of the object is
the SHA-1 or SHA-256 (as appropriate) hash of the uncompressed data.
The file for the loose object is stored under the `objects` directory, with the
first two hex characters of the object ID being the directory and the remaining
characters being the file name. This is done to shard the data and avoid too
many files being in one directory, since some file systems perform poorly with
many items in a directory.
As an example, the empty tree contains the data (when uncompressed) `tree 0\0`
and, in a SHA-256 repository, would have the object ID
`6ef19b41225c5369f1c104d45d8d85efa9b057b53b14b4b9b939dd74decc5321` and would be
stored under
`$GIT_DIR/objects/6e/f19b41225c5369f1c104d45d8d85efa9b057b53b14b4b9b939dd74decc5321`.
Similarly, a blob containing the contents `abc` would have the uncompressed
data of `blob 3\0abc`.
== Loose object mapping
When the `compatObjectFormat` option is used, Git needs to store a mapping
between the repository's main algorithm and the compatibility algorithm for
loose objects as well as some auxiliary information.
The mapping consists of a set of files under `$GIT_DIR/objects/object-map`
ending in `.map`. The portion of the filename before the extension is that of
the main hash checksum (that is, the one specified in
`extensions.objectformat`) in hex format.
`git gc` will repack existing entries into one file, removing any unnecessary
objects, such as obsolete shallow entries or loose objects that have been
packed.
The file format is as follows. All values are in network byte order and all
4-byte and 8-byte values must be 4-byte aligned in the file, so the NUL padding
may be required in some cases. Git always uses the smallest number of NUL
bytes (including zero) that is required for the padding in order to make
writing files deterministic.
- A header appears at the beginning and consists of the following:
* A 4-byte mapping signature: `LMAP`
* 4-byte version number: 1
* 4-byte length of the header section (including reserved entries but
excluding any NUL padding).
* 4-byte number of objects declared in this map file.
* 4-byte number of object formats declared in this map file.
* For each object format:
** 4-byte format identifier (e.g., `sha1` for SHA-1)
** 4-byte length in bytes of shortened object names (that is, prefixes of
the full object names). This is the shortest possible length needed to
make names in the shortened object name table unambiguous.
** 8-byte integer, recording where tables relating to this format
are stored in this index file, as an offset from the beginning.
* 8-byte offset to the trailer from the beginning of this file.
* The remainder of the header section is reserved for future use.
Readers must ignore unrecognized data here.
- Zero or more NUL bytes. These are used to improve the alignment of the
4-byte quantities below.
- Tables for the first object format:
* A sorted table of shortened object names. These are prefixes of the names
of all objects in this file, packed together to reduce the cache footprint
of the binary search for a specific object name.
* A sorted table of full object names.
* A table of 4-byte metadata values.
- Zero or more NUL bytes.
- Tables for subsequent object formats:
* A sorted table of shortened object names. These are prefixes of the names
of all objects in this file, packed together without offset values to
reduce the cache footprint of the binary search for a specific object name.
* A table of full object names in the order specified by the first object format.
* A table of 4-byte values mapping object name order to the order of the
first object format. For an object in the table of sorted shortened object
names, the value at the corresponding index in this table is the index in
the previous table for that same object.
* Zero or more NUL bytes.
- The trailer consists of the following:
* Hash checksum of all of the above using the main hash.
The lower six bits of each metadata table contain a type field indicating the
reason that this object is stored:
0::
Reserved.
1::
This object is stored as a loose object in the repository.
2::
This object is a shallow entry. The mapping refers to a shallow value
returned by a remote server.
3::
This object is a submodule entry. The mapping refers to the commit stored
representing a submodule.
Other data may be stored in this field in the future. Bits that are not used
must be zero.
GIT
---
Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite