upx
I'm not sure if people are aware that the upx executable file compressor works fine for the ARM platform. It compresses executables and shared libraries (.so files). It could be run natively on the kindle or on an i386 linux, windows or other platform. It appears that upx on all platforms can compress binaries on all other supported platforms.
On modern desktop CPUs, decompression overhead is not an issue, but on the kindle there may be some small delay for large files. For example, the 8.5MB mplayer binary comresses to 4.0MB (upx --best) but adds a startup delay of 0.9 seconds. If one were to move the binary to the root partition where space is precious this seems a reasonable trade-off. Small files up to a few 100k do not show a noticeable startup delay. The delay is a little larger for compressed i386 binaries run on the kindle under qemu. For example, the 20MB kindlegen i386 linux binary compresses down to 6MB but adds more than 5 seconds delay.
Note that compressed binaries (especially shared libraries) do not always work so they should be tested. The compression is reversable (upx -d) in case of problems. It should be obvious that files are to be stripped before compression.
Comments or suggestions? Are there any executables on the root partition that would benefit from compression?
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