A little walk down memory lane: I once ran the exe mailing list for exe packers and protection tools. There was a whole scene of people in the 90s writing such tools and writing unpackers and removal tools for such things. UPX was one of the later ones that still existed when most of this scene vanished.
https://in4k.github.io/wiki/exe-packers-tweakers-and-linkers
(Incidentally, these advanced packers also tend to frustrate RE to some extent, since the same tricks they use to increase compression ratios can often greatly confuse RE tools.)
I still have the malicious file on VM for me to do some analysis on it later. (if anyone would like it, feel free to contact me) edit: added the contact me
You'd be suprised at how much of an elf binary is all 0's.
I would be surprised to see practical performance degradation in uncompressing executable code before jumping to the program on today's machine. The largest binary in my /usr/bin/ is 50 megabytes. On the other hand, for very, very large binaries it's probably faster to decompress in memory rather than load all the bits from disk.
Further, most executables aren't static these days. (I often wish they were, though!). What type of binaries have you got, and are they really so big that it's worth the hassle to compress them just to save disk space?
Just interested.
The binaries are mostly stuff like pandoc and compiled statically so that I can run them anywhere. Nothing too special.
Its not technically needed, but it makes network transfer faster and in general thats good enough. Its not really intended to reduce disk space really, just more a way to make things more manageable.
If you use uncompressed (or transparently compressed by the filesystem) binary, your process has mmaped the memory pages, which can be discarded and then reloaded, as needed.
If you use self-extractor, your process has dirty pages that it itself wrote, that cannot be discarded, but must be moved to swap if needed.
The more you use the same executable for multiple processes, the worse the effect is. The ro mmaped pages are shared among them all, the written pages are private to each process.
I just remembered: ProcDump32! Geez, that really blew my mind at the time and in a way still does.