Re: [iPAQ] Getting Initimate and Famliar to play nice.

>I would like to state that solutions to save diskspace like gzexe are
>not that useful, especially on an iPaq. Yes, they will allow you to cram
>more executables on a disk.

>However, in order to run the application they need to be decompressed.
>The decompression is done to an allocated area of memory (malloc or
>anonymous mmap), this memory is not shared between running processes and
>cannot be 'paged', i.e. under memory pressure the executable code has to
>be written to swapspace.

>So this solution will gobble up memory for applications of which
>multiple instances are running, such as xterms or perhaps the python
>interpreter. It is also not very good for larger applications, being
>able to simply discard unused code pages of the X-server and reload them
>whenever they are needed is something you'd pretty much want to rely on
>with a small memory machine that doesn't provide swapspace.

gzexe is as selective as we want it to be. For code that runs multiple
instances, don't compress it. I don't see multiple instances of, say,
dvdview running at the same time.

The Intimate distro, running on a 340MB+ udrive, is designed to have ~64MB
of swapspace. The idea is to have a complete, working Debian system on the
iPAQ.

>So what is left over are the small files. For these, efficient
>compression is harder to achieve, and ext2 doesn't pack multiple files
>in a single (1K or even 4K) block will pretty much remove any
>usefullness in this area.

>Compressing data files does sometimes pay off, it is possible to use a
>LD_PRELOAD trick to allow unmodified application to read gzip compressed
>datafiles.
> http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/zlibc/zlibc.3.html

I just started looking at the use of zlibc. It looks promising, especially
for libs.

>Another really useful set of tools to save diskspace is perforate, which
>consists of
> zum recreate holes (remove 0-filled blocks) in files.
> finddup/nodup find/relink non-hardlinked duplicates of files.
> findstrip find unstripped executables.

>Perforate is part of the Debian distribution. According to the package,
>the sources were obtained from:

> ftp://gd.cs.CSUFresno.EDU:/pub/sun4bin/src

Thanks for the tip. Something else to look into. I would love to get a
reasonably complete Debian install down to ~150MB, without taking any major
performance hits.

Tom
Received on Thu Mar 29 09:02:41 2001