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Re: Compressed exec and core files
- From: Michael Eager <eager at eagerm dot com>
- To: binutils at sourceware dot org
- Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 12:30:57 -0800
- Subject: Re: Compressed exec and core files
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <54C2A8BE dot 2020807 at eagerm dot com> <CAMe9rOruoc6sN6ukfgYKv6BY3YjFUFuUX7QCgRnQ_p2VmHTcVg at mail dot gmail dot com>
On 01/23/15 12:19, H.J. Lu wrote:
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Michael Eager <eager@eagerm.com> wrote:
I'm working on a patch to BFD to support opening compressed
exec and core files transparently. When bfd_fopen is called
to open a compressed file, the file would be decompressed into
a temporary file, and the bfd for the temp returned. Compression
with gzip and bzip2 would be supported (others can be added later).
This seems pretty straight-forward. Any thoughts or comments?
Are you going to fork/exec gzip/bzip2 for this or call zlib/bzip2-libs?
Could do either. Exec is simpler. libz.so is currently a dependency,
adding libbzip2.so wouldn't be a big deal, but this might be a slippery
slope, where each added compression results in another library dependency.
Using exec means that the decompress program needs to be on the path, but
the failure mode if it is not found is pretty transparent.
--
Michael Eager eager@eagercon.com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306 650-325-8077