Delta Generator is a research proposal aimed at interns with data science and algorithmic skills.
The goal of the research project is to provide an algorithm and tooling for generating offline deltas between two squashfs images. Existing approaches (xdelta3) either are ignorant of the internal compression and structure or (squashdelta) have limited support for files used in the wild.
Researchers should analyze the squashfs data format, as documented in the kernel and in other places, and propose a delta algorithm of their choice. The algorithm should be benchmarked on daily builds of oniro-image-base for x86 and aarch64 architectures, as provided by the Oniro continuous integration system. The baseline to compare against is xdelta3.
The result of the work should be an algorithm for computing and applying delta between two images, preliminary tooling for performing the delta, and separate preliminary tooling for comparisons and reporting.
Tooling should be written in a combination of the following technologies: make, sh, bash, python, c and go.