argon2: allocate blocks as a single chunk of bytes

While investigating the scaling performance of the parallel
implementation, I noticed a substantial chunk of time taken on
block allocation in `hash_password_into`.

The issue lies in `vec![Block::default; ...]`, which clones the supplied
block. This happens because the standard library lacks a suitable
specialization that can be used with `Block` (or, for that matter,
`[u64; 128]`).

Therefore, let's instead allocate a big bag of bytes and then transmute
it, or more precisely a mutable slice into it, to produce the slice of
blocks to pass into `hash_password_into_with_memory`.

One point to pay attention to is that `Blocks` currently specifies
64-byte alignment, while a byte slice has alignment of 1.

Luckily, `slice::align_to_mut` is particularly well suited for this. It
is also cleaner and less error prone than other unsafe alternatives I
tried (a couple of them using `MaybeUninit`).

This patch passes Miri on:

    reference_argon2i_v0x13_2_8_2
    reference_argon2id_v0x13_2_8_2

And the performance gains are considerable:

argon2id V0x13 m=2048 t=8 p=4
                        time:   [3.3493 ms 3.3585 ms 3.3686 ms]
                        change: [-6.1577% -5.7842% -5.4067%] (p = 0.00 < 0.05)
                        Performance has improved.

argon2id V0x13 m=32768 t=4 p=4
                        time:   [24.106 ms 24.253 ms 24.401 ms]
                        change: [-9.8553% -8.9089% -7.9745%] (p = 0.00 < 0.05)
                        Performance has improved.

argon2id V0x13 m=1048576 t=1 p=4
                        time:   [181.68 ms 182.96 ms 184.35 ms]
                        change: [-28.165% -27.506% -26.896%] (p = 0.00 < 0.05)
                        Performance has improved.

(For the users that don't allocate the blocks themselves).

Author: jonasmalacofilho

argon2/src/lib.rs

@@ -239,7 +239,13 @@ impl<'key> Argon2<'key> {
     #[cfg(feature = "alloc")]
     #[cfg_attr(docsrs, doc(cfg(feature = "alloc")))]
     pub fn hash_password_into(&self, pwd: &[u8], salt: &[u8], out: &mut [u8]) -> Result<()> {
-        let mut blocks = vec![Block::default(); self.params.block_count()];
+        // For moderate and large `n`, `vec![Block::new(); n]` is significantly slower than
+        // creating a `Vec` of bytes. But as byte slices have alignment of 1, use a vec one `Block`
+        // alignment too large to ensure that we can get enough aligned blocks out of it.
+        let size = self.params.block_count() * size_of::<Block>() + align_of::<Block>();
+        let mut bytes = vec![0u8; size];
+        // SAFETY: all-zeros is a valid bit pattern for `Block`.
+        let (_, mut blocks, _) = unsafe { bytes.align_to_mut::<Block>() };
         self.hash_password_into_with_memory(pwd, salt, out, &mut blocks)
     }