[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 01:08:19AM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > Jeff Garzik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > > On 13 Dec 2001, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > > > We can put the > > > > decompressor in the image file. We should actually be able to switch > > > > decompressors and get better compression than what gunzip gives. > > > > > > If you are thinking about bzip2 be warned it requires 1MB or so of > > > temporary decompression buffers, when the input is maximally > > > compressed... > > > > Actually I was thinking of upx, which is designed for compressing > > executables. It has a really small light weight decompressor. The > > small decompressor makes a real difference on moderately sized > > executables. And it does compress just a little bit better than > > gzip. > > If you look closely at upx, you will see that the licensing is very > confusing.
Just skimming they have some interesting exceptions to allow use with a non-gpl'd programs. The wording on that section is imperfect as it seems to remove some of the GPL freedoms but that is the only issue that I see. > The package claims to be using the GNU GPL; however, if one > actually grabs the source and tries to compile it, it turns out the > compression algorithms used are not freely distributed (LZO package). > There are a set of GPL compression algorithms that may be used (UCL), but > they do not compress nearly as well. Interesting. I compiled it a while ago, and I didn't see that. It may be simply because I didn't mess with anything besides UCL. O.k. I just looked a little closer and if you information was accurate it seems quite dated. lzo is not even mentioned in recent upx readmes. And the copy I have of when it was mentioned provides a url. At any rate. My point is, is that there are lighter weight compression programs than gzip for static executables. And upx is a good example on that score. In truth it would need to be slightly modified before it could be used with linuxBIOS, so there are certainly hurdles before we could adopt it. Eric
