Most distros want xz linked against shared liblzma, so
it doesn't help much to require --enable-dynamic for that.
Those who want to avoid PIC on x86-32 to get better
performance, can still do it e.g. by using --disable-shared
to compile xz and then another pass to compile shared liblzma.
Part of these static/dynamic tricks were needed for Windows
in the past. Nowadays we rely on GCC and binutils to do the
right thing with auto-import. If the Autotooled build system
needs to support some other toolchain on Windows in the future,
this may need some rethinking.
Lots of content was updated on the xz man page.
Technical improvements:
- Start a new sentence on a new line.
- Use fairly short lines.
- Use constant-width font for examples (where supported).
- Some minor cleanups.
Thanks to Jonathan Nieder for some language fixes.
For several people, the limiter causes bigger problems that
it solves, so it is better to have it disabled by default.
Those who want to have a limiter by default need to enable
it via the environment variable XZ_DEFAULTS.
Support for environment variable XZ_DEFAULTS was added. It is
parsed before XZ_OPT and technically identical with it. The
intended uses differ quite a bit though; see the man page.
The memory usage limit can now be set separately for
compression and decompression using --memlimit-compress and
--memlimit-decompress. To set both at once, -M or --memlimit
can be used. --memory was retained as a legacy alias for
--memlimit for backwards compatibility.
The semantics of --info-memory were changed in backwards
incompatible way. Compatibility wasn't meaningful due to
changes in the memory usage limiter functionality.
The memory usage limiter info is no longer shown at the
bottom of xz --long -help.
The memory usage limiter support for removed completely from xzdec.
xz's man page was updated to match the above changes. Various
unrelated fixes were also made to the man page.
Originally both base-2 and base-10 were supported, but since
there seems to be little need for base-10 in XZ Utils, treat
everything as base-2 and also be more relaxed about the case
of the first letter of the suffix. Now xz will accept e.g.
KiB, Ki, k, K, kB, and KB, and interpret them all as 1024. The
recommended spelling of the suffixes are still KiB, MiB, and GiB.
It still feels a bit wrong to round 1 byte to 1 MiB but
at least it is now done consistently so that the same
byte value is always rounded the same way to MiB.
Previously the default limit was always 40 % of RAM. The
new limit is a little bit more complex:
- If 40 % of RAM is at least 80 MiB, 40 % of RAM is used
as the limit.
- If 80 % of RAM is over 80 MiB, 80 MiB is used as the limit.
- Otherwise 80 % of RAM is used as the limit.
This should make it possible to decompress files created with
"xz -9" on more systems. Swapping is generally more expected
on systems with less RAM, so higher default limit on them
shouldn't cause too bad surprises in terms of heavy swapping.
Instead, the higher default limit should reduce the number of
bad surprises when it used to prevent decompression of files
created with "xz -9". The DoS prevention system shouldn't be
a DoS itself.
Note that even with the new default limit, a system with 64 MiB
RAM cannot decompress files created with "xz -9" without user
overriding the limit. This should be OK, because if xz is going
to need more memory than the system has RAM, it will run very
very slowly and thus it's good that user has to override the limit
in that case.
I had hoped to keep liblzma as purely a compression
library as possible (e.g. file I/O will go into
a different library), but it seems that applications
linking agaisnt liblzma need some way to determine
the memory usage limit, and knowing the amount of RAM
is one reasonable way to help making such decisions.
Thanks to Jonathan Nieder for the original patch.
Separate a few reusable components from XZ Utils specific
code. The reusable code is now in "tuklib" modules. A few
more could be separated still, e.g. bswap.h.
Fix some bugs in lzmainfo.
Fix physmem and cpucores code on OS/2. Thanks to Elbert Pol
for help.
Add OpenVMS support into physmem. Add a few #ifdefs to ease
building XZ Utils on OpenVMS. Thanks to Jouk Jansen for the
original patch.
It was ignored for compatibility with xz, but now that
--decompress --stdout --force copies unrecognized files
as is to stdout, simply ignoring --force in xzdec would
be wrong. xzdec will not support copying unrecognized
data as is to stdout, so it cannot support --force.
use AC_PROG_SED. We don't do anything fancy with sed,
so this should work OK. libtool 2.2 sets SED but 1.5
doesn't, so $(SED) happened to work when using libtool 2.2.
Don't use libtool convenience libraries to avoid recently
discovered long-standing subtle but somewhat severe bugs
in libtool (at least 1.5.22 and 2.2.6 are affected). It
was found when porting XZ Utils to Windows
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libtool/2009-06/msg00070.html>
but the problem is significant also e.g. on GNU/Linux.
Unless --disable-shared is passed to configure, static
library built from a set of convenience libraries will
contain PIC objects. That is, while libtool builds non-PIC
objects too, only PIC objects will be used from the
convenience libraries. On 32-bit x86 (tested on mobile XP2400+),
using PIC instead of non-PIC makes the decompressor 10 % slower
with the default CFLAGS.
So while xz was linked against static liblzma by default,
it got the slower PIC objects unless --disable-shared was
used. I tend develop and benchmark with --disable-shared
due to faster build time, so I hadn't noticed the problem
in benchmarks earlier.
This commit also adds support for building Windows resources
into liblzma and executables.
Don't round the memory usage limit in xzdec --help to avoid
an integer overflow and to not give wrong impression that
the limit is high enough when it may not actually be.
Now configure.ac will get the version number directly from
src/liblzma/api/lzma/version.h. The intent is to reduce the
number of places where the version number is duplicated. In
future, support for displaying Git commit ID may be added too.
linked statically or dynamically against liblzma. The
default is still to use static liblzma, but it can now
be changed by passing --enable-dynamic to configure.
Thanks to Mike Frysinger for the original patch.
Fixed a few minor bugs in configure.ac.
Half of developers were already forgetting to use these
functions, which could have caused total breakage in some future
liblzma version or even now if --enable-small was used. Now
liblzma uses pthread_once() to do the initializations unless
it has been built with --disable-threads which make these
initializations thread-unsafe.
When --enable-small isn't used, liblzma currently gets needlessly
linked against libpthread (on systems that have it). While it is
stupid for now, liblzma will need threads in future anyway, so
this stupidity will be temporary only.
When --enable-small is used, different code CRC32 and CRC64 is
now used than without --enable-small. This made the resulting
binary slightly smaller, but the main reason was to clean it up
and to handle the lack of lzma_init_check().
The pkg-config file lzma.pc was renamed to liblzma.pc. I'm not
sure if it works correctly and portably for static linking
(Libs.private includes -pthread or other operating system
specific flags). Hopefully someone complains if it is bad.
lzma_rc_prices[] is now included as a precomputed array even
with --enable-small. It's just 128 bytes now that it uses uint8_t
instead of uint32_t. Smaller array seemed to be at least as fast
as the more bloated uint32_t array on x86; hopefully it's not bad
on other architectures.
Lasse Collin