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barureddy
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2008 3:56 am    Post subject: UPX on Gentoo Reply with quote

For those who do no know about upx, upx is a compressor of executable files that doesn't require any special software and works on the fly.

Does anyone have any experience of compressing all/some their programs with upx under linux/gentoo?
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MostAwesomeDude
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 11, 2008 5:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

UPX works fine. You can emerge it:

Code:
# emerge -av app-arch/upx


I don't recommend using it on the entire system; besides the obvious speed problems, I think that there are some programs that get upset if you UPX them.
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barureddy
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 5:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I was thinking of UPXing my entire system mostly due to my laptop's abysmal HD performance (nothing to do with linux, because it sucks in winxp too). I see this as a way my my system more responsive.

Does anyone have experience with doing this to their entire system? Additionally is there a list of programs that are not compatible well with upx?
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MostAwesomeDude
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 6:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A couple searches suggest that nobody has been intrepid (or foolhardy) enough to attempt to UPX their entire system.

What's wrong with your laptop's hard drive?
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nwmcsween
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 7:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is a bad idea since almost all hard drives have DMA access it goes from HDA-> Memory when you UPX it has to go through HDA -> Processor -> Memory
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Massimo B.
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 1:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interesting idea. At least Arch has this recommendation about their Firefox_Tweaks.
I have an idea of a UPX ebuild including some cronjob and configuration such as prelink (note that prelink doesn't work on UPX compressed files). There it would be possible to have a list of binaries such as firefox that should be re-compressed after updates, as well as excluding these from the prelink cronjob...
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LiamOS
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 5:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you want to use compression, you could consider btrfs, as it compresses files on disk. I wouldn't expect it to be hugely effective, but it should give some improvement on larger binaries.
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Ant P.
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 22, 2012 12:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You would probably have a more meaningful improvement by using squashfs + XZ + BCJ filters on /usr/{bin,lib} instead of either of those methods, since then your binaries would both be efficiently compressed (by an executable-specific compressor) and contiguous on disk.
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Massimo B.
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 22, 2012 8:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, I already use squashfs in combination with aufs3 by mv's squash_dir scripts for portage, /var/db etc. for better performance.
But I did not think about using it for binaries. Maybe that would work and just needs to be re-squashed after updates. So I could just start and add /usr/lib64/firefox...
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