Files
Joe Tsai e713daf3d5 util/cobs: add new package for frame encoding
Package cobs implements Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing (COBS),
a technique for reliable packet framing over serial byte streams.

This has future utility for storing a sequence of arbitrary log entries
on disk without needing to depend on intrinsic framing within
the log entries themselves (e.g., JSON or CBOR).

While more complicated, COBS is superior to offset-based framing
mechanisms as the null byte can be trivially used to demarcate
the boundaries of a frame. This makes COBS more resistant
against bit-corruption where a single corrupted offset
can make everything else in the file unreadable.
COBS makes it possible to resynchronize framing after a
corrupted section by simply searching for the next null.

Performance:

	Benchmark/EncodeForward/Zeros-32         	   16341	     76312 ns/op	13740.68 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
	Benchmark/EncodeReverse/Zeros-32         	    6326	    188261 ns/op	5569.79 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
	Benchmark/DecodeForward/Zeros-32         	   16461	     72140 ns/op	14535.28 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op

	Benchmark/EncodeForward/NonZeros-32      	   41797	     29155 ns/op	35965.56 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
	Benchmark/EncodeReverse/NonZeros-32      	    4792	    248788 ns/op	4214.74 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
	Benchmark/DecodeForward/NonZeros-32      	   35790	     34584 ns/op	30319.92 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op

	Benchmark/EncodeForward/Random-32        	   23042	     53727 ns/op	19516.64 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
	Benchmark/EncodeReverse/Random-32        	    3164	    374590 ns/op	2799.26 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
	Benchmark/DecodeForward/Random-32        	   27241	     58506 ns/op	17922.41 MB/s	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op

EncodeReverse performance is notably slower than EncodeForward
because modern CPU architectures are not as optimized for
reading from memory in reverse.
However, reverse encoding is necessary if appending into
a dst buffer that is identical to the src buffer.
In such a case, the CPU performance hit is worth the benefit
of avoiding an intermediate allocation.
Speeds of GB/s is still plenty fast enough and
magnitudes faster than JSON or CBOR encoding.

Updates #17242
Updates tailscale/corp#21363

Signed-off-by: Joe Tsai <joetsai@digital-static.net>
2026-07-08 11:48:23 -07:00
..