Re: Using compression before encryption in device-mapper

[Jörn Engel]

On Wed, 14 April 2004 12:02:07 +0200, Guillaume Lacôte wrote:
> 
> > > Oops ! I thought it was possible to guarantee with the Huffman encoding
> > > (which is more basic than Lempev-Zif) that the compressed data use no
> > > more than 1 bit for every byte (i.e. 12,5% more space).
> >
> > Makes sense, although I'd like to see the proof first.  Shouldn't be
> > too hard to do.
> >
> I was referring to the paper by Jeffrey Scott Vitter "Design and Analysis of 
> Dynamic Huffman Codes" (accessible through http://acm.org). It defines a 
> refinement of the well-known dynamic Huffman algorithm by Faller, Gallager 
> and Knuth such that the encoded length will use at most _one_ more bit per 
> encoded letter than the optimal two-pass Huffman algorithm (it is also shown 
> that the FGK algorithm an use twice the optimal length + on more bit per 
> letter).
> 
> My conclusion comes from the fact that for every text, the optimal two-pass 
> huffman encoding can _not_ be longer than the native encoding (apart from the 
> dictionnary encoding). 

Makes sense.  You should try to use the crypto/ infrastructure in the
kernel, add the compression algorithm there and use it through the
normal interface.  Apart from that, good lock! :)

Jörn

-- 
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
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