Re: FYI: dh_upx compresses i386 executables
On Sat, 21 Apr 2001 14:22:49 -0400
David B. Harris <dbarclay10@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> To quote Eduard Bloch <edi@gmx.de>,
> > #include <hallo.h>
> > Josip Rodin wrote on Sat Apr 21, 2001 um 04:29:21PM:
> > > > the decompression time is not tragical, its about 0.15s for ddd
> (3.15meg)
> > > > on Athlon-1000. Or 0.002s on a small application (exmidi, 88kB).
> > > ~~~~~~~~~~~
> > > This is some sort of common platform? I mean, it sure would be great
> if
> >
> > Not really. For testing, I installed UPX on my old 486 (clocked with
> > 50Mhz or so, 16MB RAM and enough load without UPX), there it takes 4-7
> > seconds to decompress ddd. And ~0.1-0.2s for exmidi. Anyways, I would
> > not run monsters like ddd on this machines at all.
> >
> > > majority of users had a 1GHz processor. World peace would be great,
> too. :)
> >
> > People don't run very big apps on very week machines, so the extra
> load
> > caused by upx stuff is "justifiable", IMHO.
>
> Conversely, people who have computers that can use UPX without any
> noticeable slowdown probably have plenty of hard drive space :)
Since UPX only runs when a program is loaded, and only takes a few seconds
to do its thing, I see no reason why weaker (eg, 486) machines couldn't
handle it. Even on old 386 machines, the slowdown shouldn't be much of a
headache, unless what's being compressed is a very frequently executed
program (like `ls'), in which case it'd be better not to UPX it.
In any event, UPX shouldn't matter to people with fast machines (who have
plenty of disk space and plenty of CPU power), and would benefit people
with small disk drives (who can probably live with the small load time
delay).
For these reasons, I agree with the sentiment that UPX should be used on
almost all (if not all) executables shipped with Debian.
By the way, it would be nice for UPX to be made portable, but I don't know
what prevents this from happening now. Is it written in i386 assembly?
Does
it really need to be? If so, is it feasible to write it in assembly for
other
machines?
Regards,
Alex.
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