Galois field arithmetic forms the backbone of erasure-coded storage systems, most famously the reed-solomon erasure code. a galois field is defined over w-bit words and is termed gf(2w). as such, the elements of a galois field are the integers 0, 1, . . ., 2^w ?? 1. galois field arithmetic defines addition and multiplication over these closed sets of integers in such a way that they work as you would hope they would work. specifically, every number has a unique multiplicative inverse. moreover, there is a value, typically the value 2, which has the property that you can enumerate all of the non-zero elements of the field by taking that value to successively higher powers.

this package contains the development files needed to build against the shared library.