UPX, the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables, version 2.02 released
Posted by Sachin Garg on 14th August 2006 | Permanent Link
Latest version of UPX, the versatile executable packer with nice compression ratios and fast decompression was released a few days ago.
The major new features in version 2 are:
* new format: added support for arm/pe (ARM executables running on WinCE)
* new format: added support for linux elf/amd64
* new format: added support for linux elf/ppc32
* new format: added support for mach/ppc32 (Apple Mac OS X)
* new format: added support for bootable Linux kernels (”vmlinuz/386″)
* new format: added support for Playstation exes (”ps1/exe”)
* slightly better compression using the new NRV2E algorithm
* new options for compression tuning (e.g. ‘–brute’)
* improved win32/pe compatibility
* direct ELF-to-memory decompression
* various bug fixes
Changes in 2.02:
* linux/ppc32, mach/ppc32: compressed programs now work on a 405 CPU
* vmlinuz/386: fixed zlib uncompression problem on dos
One of the nice features which caught my eye was “Your executables suffer no memory overhead or other drawbacks because of in-place decompression”. This sure is cool (btw, I am sure they meant ‘low’ overhead there :-).