This commit just adds the function. Its uses will be in
separate commits.
This hasn't been tested much yet and it's perhaps a bit early
to commit it but if there are bugs they should get found quite
quickly.
Thanks to Jun I Jin from Intel for help and for pointing out
that string comparison needs to be optimized in liblzma.
This is the simplest method to do threading, which splits
the uncompressed data into blocks and compresses them
independently from each other. There's room for improvement
especially to reduce the memory usage, but nevertheless,
this is a good start.
I had hoped to keep liblzma as purely a compression
library as possible (e.g. file I/O will go into
a different library), but it seems that applications
linking agaisnt liblzma need some way to determine
the memory usage limit, and knowing the amount of RAM
is one reasonable way to help making such decisions.
Thanks to Jonathan Nieder for the original patch.
Don't use libtool convenience libraries to avoid recently
discovered long-standing subtle but somewhat severe bugs
in libtool (at least 1.5.22 and 2.2.6 are affected). It
was found when porting XZ Utils to Windows
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libtool/2009-06/msg00070.html>
but the problem is significant also e.g. on GNU/Linux.
Unless --disable-shared is passed to configure, static
library built from a set of convenience libraries will
contain PIC objects. That is, while libtool builds non-PIC
objects too, only PIC objects will be used from the
convenience libraries. On 32-bit x86 (tested on mobile XP2400+),
using PIC instead of non-PIC makes the decompressor 10 % slower
with the default CFLAGS.
So while xz was linked against static liblzma by default,
it got the slower PIC objects unless --disable-shared was
used. I tend develop and benchmark with --disable-shared
due to faster build time, so I hadn't noticed the problem
in benchmarks earlier.
This commit also adds support for building Windows resources
into liblzma and executables.
