RFP: UPX (Was Re: reducing binary distribution size with UPX)

[egor duda]

Hi!

Friday, 15 March, 2002 Robert Collins robert.collins@itdomain.com.au wrote:

RC> I vote for including UPX... and Lapo makes two. Do we need a third? And
RC> are there any objections?

Does anybody ever tried to measure if upx impose any performance
penalties? If i understand things correctly, upx compress executable
file and attach a small "decompressor" stub to it. Then, when
executable starts, this stub decompresses original executable image.
This will totally defeat the features that most modern OSes have,
mapping pages from executable and loading them on demand, sharing
common read-only pages between different instances of one application,
etc. I really don't understand what's the point in saving disk storage
worth several cents (1byte == $1e-7), while increasing memory
footprint and reducing speed. Hey, just read upx docs, they contain
all these points already.

Not that i'm against inclusion of upx to cygwin distro -- it's a
normal package like many others after all, but i really don't
understand why somebody would want to use such a program.

Egor.            mailto:deo@logos-m.ru ICQ 5165414 FidoNet 2:5020/496.19