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Random Access Archive Format
----------------------------
This is the basic archive format for libbu++'s random access archive system.
Unlike the traditional archive, given a unique key any object may be accessed
at any time, and hopefully very quickly.
To make this as portable as possible the basic interface to the RAA is very
simple and seperated from any IO or formatting directly, any number af backends
could be constructed quite simply, this is a description of the first of these
formats.
In order to make the system handle objects that are any size, and grow quickly
and easily, I believe we should resort to a simple block allocation mechanism
with uniform block sizes linked in chains, effectively accessed via "inodes."
Therefore given a blocksize and a Table of Contents (TOC) any object should be
easy to find. The TOC can be implemented as an in-place hash table to minimize
the amount of memory that must be sacraficed for very large, seldom used
structures.
The basic header:
00-03: Magic Number, something cute, I dunno yet (encoding independant)
04: Version code (0)
05: Byte count/order for standard indexes (8/4 for 64/32bit systems)
High order bit masked out determines endianness (1 = big, 0 = little)
The program will only accept one word-width for now, we can make it
adjustable later, or fix this at 4 bytes.
06-09: Blocksize in bytes, could be anything, I don't think we need to worry
about OS related things for this, but it should be set intelligently by
the owner. This includes the bytes reserved for a block header.
10-13: Total block count, includes both used and unused blocks.
14-17: Total used blocks, useful for determining when to expand.
18-24: Reserved for flags and the like, should be all zeros for now.
At this point are a number of "blocks" each with their own header and data are
laid out sequentially, accessing one should be easy, seek to
(header size)+(block size)*(block number)
The block header is as follows:
00-03: First block in chain. If this number matches the current block index
then this block is the first in a chain.
04-07: Next block in chain. If this number matches the current block index
then this block is the last in the chain.
08-11: Prev block in chain. If this number matches the current block index
then this block is the first in the chain.
12-15: Number of bytes used. If this is the first block, this is the total
amount of data in the stream, otherwise it's the amount of data in the
current block.
16-19: Reserved flagspace or something, make sure it's all zeros.
20-xx: Block data, whatever you wanted to store. At the moment this is going
to be (blocksize) - 20 for now, it will change if the block header
changes.
Thus far we have described a generic system for storing dynamic "substreams" of
data within a larger stream using a block-allocation system. This is handy on
it's own, and implemented as a seperate mechanism, but as handy as it is, it's
not as useful without a table of contents, described here.
Any above composite datastream that uses a TOC will have the TOC be the first
block chain. The TOC will initially be a basic in-place hash table, but may
be changed to a b-tree depending on what kind of data is being used. This basic
table of contents simply links a generated UID from a program to the appropriate
block chain.
Systems like the above could be augmented with additional meta-data in order to
create flexible, small, in-file file systems and the like. For example,
providing simple fixed-width data structures to tie to "inodes" (the program
generated UIDs) you could have a mini posix filesystem in no time.
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