This is a soft limit in sense that it only affects the number of
threads. It never makes xz fail and it never makes xz change
settings that would affect the compressed output.
The idea is to make -T0 have more reasonable behavior when
the system has very many cores or when a memory-hungry
compression options are used. This also helps with 32-bit xz,
preventing it from running out of address space.
The downside of this commit is that now the number of threads
might become too low compared to what the user expected. I
hope this to be an acceptable compromise as the old behavior
has been a source of well-argued complaints for a long time.
The main problem withi the old behavior is that the compressed
output is different on single-core systems vs. multicore systems.
This commit fixes it by making -T0 one thread in multithreaded mode
on single-core systems.
The downside of this is that it uses more memory. However, if
--memlimit-compress is used, xz can (thanks to the previous commit)
drop to the single-threaded mode still.
In single-threaded mode, --memlimit-compress can make xz scale down
the LZMA2 dictionary size to meet the memory usage limit. This
obviously affects the compressed output. However, if xz was in
threaded mode, --memlimit-compress could make xz reduce the number
of threads but it wouldn't make xz switch from multithreaded mode
to single-threaded mode or scale down the LZMA2 dictionary size.
This seemed illogical and there was even a "FIXME?" about it.
Now --memlimit-compress can make xz switch to single-threaded
mode if one thread in multithreaded mode uses too much memory.
If memory usage is still too high, then the LZMA2 dictionary
size can be scaled down too.
The option --no-adjust was also changed so that it no longer
prevents xz from scaling down the number of threads as that
doesn't affect compressed output (only performance). After
this commit --no-adjust only prevents adjustments that affect
compressed output, that is, with --no-adjust xz won't switch
from multithreaded mode to single-threaded mode and won't
scale down the LZMA2 dictionary size.
The man page wasn't updated yet.
--memlimit-mt-decompress allows specifying the limit for
multithreaded decompression. This matches memlimit_threading in
liblzma. This limit can only affect the number of threads being
used; it will never prevent xz from decompressing a file. The
old --memlimit-decompress option is still used at the same time.
If the value of --memlimit-decompress (the default value or
one specified by the user) is less than the value of
--memlimit-mt-decompress , then --memlimit-mt-decompress is
reduced to match --memlimit-decompress.
Man page wasn't updated yet.
If threading support is enabled at build time, this will
use lzma_stream_decoder_mt() even for single-threaded mode.
With memlimit_threading=0 the behavior should be identical.
This needs some work like adding --memlimit-threading=LIMIT.
The original patch from Sebastian Andrzej Siewior included
a method to get currently available RAM on Linux. It might
be one way to go but as it is Linux-only, the available-RAM
approach needs work for portability or using a fallback method
on other OSes.
The man page wasn't updated yet.
xz --flush-timeout=2000, old version:
1. xz is started. The next flush will happen after two seconds.
2. No input for one second.
3. A burst of a few kilobytes of input.
4. No input for one second.
5. Two seconds have passed and flushing starts.
The first second counted towards the flush-timeout even though
there was no pending data. This can cause flushing to occur more
often than needed.
xz --flush-timeout=2000, after this commit:
1. xz is started.
2. No input for one second.
3. A burst of a few kilobytes of input. The next flush will
happen after two seconds counted from the time when the
first bytes of the burst were read.
4. No input for one second.
5. No input for another second.
6. Two seconds have passed and flushing starts.
The same code sequence repeats so it's nicer as a separate function.
Note that in one case there was no test for opt_mode != MODE_TEST,
but that was only because that condition would always be true, so
this commit doesn't change the behavior there.
When input blocked, xz --flush-timeout=1 would wake up every
millisecond and initiate flushing which would have nothing to
flush and thus would just waste CPU time. The fix disables the
timeout when no input has been seen since the previous flush.
"xz -dcfv not_an_xz_file" crashed (all four options are
required to trigger it). It caused xz to call
lzma_get_progress(&strm, ...) when no coder was initialized
in strm. In this situation strm.internal is NULL which leads
to a crash in lzma_get_progress().
The bug was introduced when xz started using lzma_get_progress()
to get progress info for multi-threaded compression, so the
bug is present in versions 5.1.3alpha and higher.
Thanks to Filip Palian <Filip.Palian@pjwstk.edu.pl> for
the bug report.
The patch is quite long but it's mostly about adding new #ifdefs
to omit code when encoders or decoders have been disabled.
This adds two new #defines to config.h: HAVE_ENCODERS and
HAVE_DECODERS.
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 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.
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().
There was somewhat illogical behavior when --extreme was
specified and mixed with custom filter chains.
Before this commit, "xz -9 --lzma2 -e" was equivalent
to "xz --lzma2". After it is equivalent to "xz -6e"
(all earlier preset options get forgotten when a custom
filter chain is specified and the default preset is 6
to which -e is applied). I find this less illogical.
This also affects the meaning of "xz -9e --lzma2 -7".
Earlier it was equivalent to "xz -7e" (the -e specified
before a custom filter chain wasn't forgotten). Now it
is "xz -7". Note that "xz -7e" still is the same as "xz -e7".
Hopefully very few cared about this in the first place,
so pretty much no one should even notice this change.
Thanks to Conley Moorhous.
Now the following works as you would expect:
echo foo | xz > foo.xz
echo bar | xz >> foo.xz
( xz -dc --single-stream ; xz -dc --single-stream ) < foo.xz
Note that it doesn't work if the input is not seekable
or if there is Stream Padding between the concatenated
.xz Streams.
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.
message_filters_to_str() converts the filter chain to
a string. message_filters_show() replaces the original
message_filters().
uint32_to_optstr() was also added to show the dictionary
size in nicer format when possible.
The opening of the destination file is now delayed a little.
The coder is initialized, and if decompressing, the memory
usage of the first Block compared against the memory
usage limit before the destination file is opened. This
means that if --force was used, the old "target" file won't
be deleted so easily when something goes wrong very early.
Thanks to Mark K for the bug report.
The above fix required some changes to progress message
handling. Now there is a separate function for setting and
printing the filename. It is used also in list.c.
list_file() now handles stdin correctly (gives an error).
A useless check for user_abort was removed from file_io.c.
a regular file.
Sparse file creation can be disabled with --no-sparse.
I don't promise yet that the name of this option won't
change before 5.0.0. It's possible that the code, that
checks when it is safe to use sparse output on stdout,
is not good enough, and a more flexible command line
option is needed to configure sparse file handling.
Lasse Collin