Generally, one gets better performance out of cryptographic routines
written in assembly than C, and this is also true for SHA-256. In
addition, most Linux distributions cannot distribute Git linked against
OpenSSL for licensing reasons.
Most systems with GnuPG will also have libgcrypt, since it is a
dependency of GnuPG. libgcrypt is also faster than the SHA1DC
implementation for messages of a few KiB and larger.
For comparison, on a Core i7-6600U, this implementation processes 16 KiB
chunks at 355 MiB/s while SHA1DC processes equivalent chunks at 337
MiB/s.
In addition, libgcrypt is licensed under the LGPL 2.1, which is
compatible with the GPL. Add an implementation of SHA-256 that uses
libgcrypt.
Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
SHA-1 is weak and we need to transition to a new hash function. For
some time, we have referred to this new function as NewHash. Recently,
we decided to pick SHA-256 as NewHash. The reasons behind the choice of
SHA-256 are outlined in the thread starting at [1] and in the commit
history for the hash function transition document.
Add a basic implementation of SHA-256 based off libtomcrypt, which is in
the public domain. Optimize it and restructure it to meet our coding
standards. Pull in the update and final functions from the SHA-1 block
implementation, as we know these function correctly with all compilers.
This implementation is slower than SHA-1, but more performant
implementations will be introduced in future commits.
Wire up SHA-256 in the list of hash algorithms, and add a test that the
algorithm works correctly.
Note that with this patch, it is still not possible to switch to using
SHA-256 in Git. Additional patches are needed to prepare the code to
handle a larger hash algorithm and further test fixes are needed.
[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/20180609224913.GC38834@genre.crustytoothpaste.net/
Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
brian m. carlson