Previously, --block-list and --block-size only worked together
in threaded mode. Boundaries are specified by --block-list, but
--block-size specifies the maximum size for a Block. Now this
works in single-threaded mode too.
Thanks to James M Leddy for the original patch.
Now if --block-list is used in threaded mode, the encoder
won't need to flush at each Block boundary specified via
--block-list. This improves performance a lot, making
threading helpful with --block-list.
The flush timer was reset after LZMA_FULL_FLUSH but since
LZMA_FULL_BARRIER doesn't flush, resetting the timer is
no longer done.
Now --block-list=SIZES works with in the threaded mode too,
although the performance is still bad due to the use of
LZMA_FULL_FLUSH instead of the new LZMA_FULL_BARRIER.
Now liblzma only uses "mythread" functions and types
which are defined in mythread.h matching the desired
threading method.
Before Windows Vista, there is no direct equivalent to
pthread condition variables. Since this package doesn't
use pthread_cond_broadcast(), pre-Vista threading can
still be kept quite simple. The pre-Vista code doesn't
use anything that wasn't already available in Windows 95,
so the binaries should run even on Windows 95 if someone
happens to care.
Previously it was done in configure, but doing that goes
against the Autoconf manual. Autoconf requires that it is
possible to override e.g. prefix after running configure
and that doesn't work correctly if liblzma.pc is created
by configure.
A potential downside of this change is that now e.g.
libdir in liblzma.pc is a standalone string instead of
being defined via ${prefix}, so if one overrides prefix
when running pkg-config the libdir won't get the new value.
I don't know if this matters in practice.
Thanks to Vincent Torri.
When --flush-timeout=TIMEOUT is used, xz will use
LZMA_SYNC_FLUSH if read() would block and at least
TIMEOUT milliseconds has elapsed since the previous flush.
This can be useful in realtime-like use cases where the
data is simultanously decompressed by another process
(possibly on a different computer). If new uncompressed
input data is produced slowly, without this option xz could
buffer the data for a long time until it would become
decompressible from the output.
If TIMEOUT is 0, the feature is disabled. This is the default.
This commit affects the compression side. Using xz for
the decompression side for the above purpose doesn't work
yet so well because there is quite a bit of input and
output buffering when decompressing.
The --long-help or man page were not updated yet.
The details of this feature may change.
Testing for end of file was no longer correct after full flushing
became possible with --block-size=SIZE and --block-list=SIZES.
There was no bug in practice though because xz just made a few
unneeded zero-byte reads.
This switches units from microseconds to milliseconds.
New clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) will be used if available.
There is still a fallback to gettimeofday().
The man pages of lzmainfo, xzmore, and xzdec had similar
constructs as the man page of xz had before the commit
eb6ca9854b. Eric S. Raymond
didn't mention these man pages in his bug report, but
it's nice to be consistent.
Now both reading and writing should be without
race conditions with signals.
They might still be signal handling issues left.
Signals are blocked during many operations to avoid
EINTR but it may cause problems e.g. if writing to
stderr blocks when trying to display an error message.
It is possible that a signal to set user_abort arrives right
before a blocking system call is made. In this case the call
may block until another signal arrives, while the wanted
behavior is to make xz clean up and exit as soon as possible.
After this commit, the race condition is avoided with the
input side which already uses non-blocking I/O. The output
side still uses blocking I/O and thus has the race condition.
POSIX says that fcntl(fd, F_SETFL, flags) returns -1 on
error and "other than -1" on success. This is how it is
documented e.g. on OpenBSD too. On Linux, success with
F_SETFL is always 0 (at least accorinding to fcntl(2)
from man-pages 3.51).
Due to a wrong variable name, when writing a sparse file
to standard output, *all* file status flags were cleared
(to the extent the operating system allowed it) instead of
only clearing the O_APPEND flag. In practice this worked
fine in the common situations on GNU/Linux, but I didn't
check how it behaved elsewhere.
The original flags were still restored correctly. I still
changed the code to use a separate boolean variable to
indicate when the flags should be restored instead of
relying on a special value in stdout_flags.
Input file can be a FIFO or something else that doesn't
support posix_fadvise() so don't check the return value
even with an assertion. Nothing bad happens if the call
to posix_fadvise() fails.
It is a no-op for now, but if an old xz version is used
together with a newer liblzma that supports something new,
then this check becomes important and will stop the old xz
from trying to parse files that it won't understand.
It should actually still work with Automake 1.10 if
the serial-tests option is removed. Automake 1.13 started
using parallel tests by default and the option to get
the old behavior isn't supported before 1.12.
At least for now, parallel tests don't improve anything
in XZ Utils but they hide the progress output from
test_compress.sh.
Lasse Collin
Anders F Bjorklund