The SIZE_MAX / 3 was 1365 MiB. 1400 MiB gives little more room
and it looks like a round (artificial) number in --info-memory
once --info-memory is made to display it.
Also, using #if avoids useless code on 64-bit builds.
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.
--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.
Due to architectural limitations, address space available to a single
userspace process on MIPS32 is limited to 2 GiB, not 4, even on systems
that have more physical RAM -- e.g. 64-bit systems with 32-bit
userspace, or systems that use XPA (an extension similar to x86's PAE).
So, for MIPS32, we have to impose stronger memory limits. I've chosen
2000MiB to give the process some headroom.
See the code comment for reasoning. It's far from perfect but
hopefully good enough for certain cases while hopefully doing
nothing bad in other situations.
At presets -5 ... -9, 4020 MiB vs. 4096 MiB makes no difference
on how xz scales down the number of threads.
The limit has to be a few MiB below 4096 MiB because otherwise
things like "xz --lzma2=dict=500MiB" won't scale down the dict
size enough and xz cannot allocate enough memory. With
"ulimit -v $((4096 * 1024))" on x86-64, the limit in xz had
to be no more than 4085 MiB. Some safety margin is good though.
This is hack but it should be useful when running 32-bit xz on
a 64-bit kernel that gives full 4 GiB address space to xz.
Hopefully this is enough to solve this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1196786
FreeBSD has a patch that limits the result in tuklib_physmem()
to SIZE_MAX on 32-bit systems. While I think it's not the way
to do it, the results on --memlimit-compress have been good. This
commit should achieve practically identical results for compression
while leaving decompression and tuklib_physmem() and thus
lzma_physmem() unaffected.
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.
Previously the default limit was always 40 % of RAM. The
new limit is a little bit more complex:
- If 40 % of RAM is at least 80 MiB, 40 % of RAM is used
as the limit.
- If 80 % of RAM is over 80 MiB, 80 MiB is used as the limit.
- Otherwise 80 % of RAM is used as the limit.
This should make it possible to decompress files created with
"xz -9" on more systems. Swapping is generally more expected
on systems with less RAM, so higher default limit on them
shouldn't cause too bad surprises in terms of heavy swapping.
Instead, the higher default limit should reduce the number of
bad surprises when it used to prevent decompression of files
created with "xz -9". The DoS prevention system shouldn't be
a DoS itself.
Note that even with the new default limit, a system with 64 MiB
RAM cannot decompress files created with "xz -9" without user
overriding the limit. This should be OK, because if xz is going
to need more memory than the system has RAM, it will run very
very slowly and thus it's good that user has to override the limit
in that case.
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.
Separate a few reusable components from XZ Utils specific
code. The reusable code is now in "tuklib" modules. A few
more could be separated still, e.g. bswap.h.
Fix some bugs in lzmainfo.
Fix physmem and cpucores code on OS/2. Thanks to Elbert Pol
for help.
Add OpenVMS support into physmem. Add a few #ifdefs to ease
building XZ Utils on OpenVMS. Thanks to Jouk Jansen for the
original patch.
compressing and decompressing. This should be OK now that
xz automatically scales down the compression settings if
they would exceed the memory usage limit (earlier, the limit
for compression was increased to 90 % because low limit broke
scripts that used "xz -9" on systems with low RAM).
Support spcifying the memory usage limit as a percentage
of RAM (e.g. --memory=50%).
Support --threads=0 to reset the thread limit to the default
value (number of available CPU cores). Use UINT32_MAX instead
of SIZE_MAX as the maximum in args.c. hardware.c was already
expecting uint32_t value.
Cleaned up the output of --help and --long-help.
the number of CPU cores. Added support for using sysinfo()
on Linux systems whose libc lacks appropriate sysconf()
support (at least dietlibc). The Autoconf macros were
split into separate files, and CPU core count detection
was moved from hardware.c to cpucores.h. The core count
isn't used for anything real for now, so a problematic
part in process.c was commented out.