8 1.2. Platform-specific notes
13 1.2.5. Solaris, OpenSolaris, and derivatives
17 1.3. Adding support for new platforms
19 2.1. Static vs. dynamic linking of liblzma
20 2.2. Optimizing xzdec and lzmadec
21 3. xzgrep and other scripts
25 4.1. "No C99 compiler was found."
26 4.2. "No POSIX conforming shell (sh) was found."
27 4.3. configure works but build fails at crc32_x86.S
28 4.4. Lots of warnings about symbol visibility
29 4.5. "make check" fails
30 4.6. liblzma.so (or similar) not found when running xz
36 If you aren't familiar with building packages that use GNU Autotools,
37 see the file INSTALL.generic for generic instructions before reading
40 If you are going to build a package for distribution, see also the
41 file PACKAGERS. It contains information that should help making the
42 binary packages as good as possible, but the information isn't very
43 interesting to those making local builds for private use or for use
44 in special situations like embedded systems.
47 1. Supported platforms
48 ----------------------
50 XZ Utils are developed on GNU/Linux, but they should work on many
51 POSIX-like operating systems like *BSDs and Solaris, and even on
52 a few non-POSIX operating systems.
57 A C99 compiler is required to compile XZ Utils. If you use GCC, you
58 need at least version 3.x.x. GCC version 2.xx.x doesn't support some
59 C99 features used in XZ Utils source code, thus GCC 2 won't compile
62 XZ Utils takes advantage of some GNU C extensions when building
63 with GCC. Because these extensions are used only when building
64 with GCC, it should be possible to use any C99 compiler.
67 1.2. Platform-specific notes
71 If you use IBM XL C compiler, pass CC=xlc_r to configure. If
72 you use CC=xlc instead, you must disable threading support
73 with --disable-threads (usually not recommended).
78 MIPSpro 7.4.4m has been reported to produce broken code if using
79 the -O2 optimization flag ("make check" fails). Using -O1 should
82 A problem has been reported when using shared liblzma. Passing
83 --disable-shared to configure works around this. Alternatively,
84 putting "-64" to CFLAGS to build a 64-bit version might help too.
89 The default install of MINIX 3 includes Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK),
90 which doesn't support C99. Install GCC to compile XZ Utils.
92 MINIX 3.1.8 and older have bugs in /usr/include/stdint.h, which has
93 to be patched before XZ Utils can be compiled correctly. See
94 <http://gforge.cs.vu.nl/gf/project/minix/tracker/?action=TrackerItemEdit&tracker_item_id=537>.
96 MINIX 3.2.0 and later use a different libc and aren't affected by
99 XZ Utils doesn't have code to detect the amount of physical RAM and
100 number of CPU cores on MINIX 3.
102 See section 4.4 in this file about symbol visibility warnings (you
103 may want to pass gl_cv_cc_visibility=no to configure).
108 XZ Utils can be built for OpenVMS, but the build system files
109 are not included in the XZ Utils source package. The required
110 OpenVMS-specific files are maintained by Jouk Jansen and can be
113 http://nchrem.tnw.tudelft.nl/openvms/software2.html#xzutils
116 1.2.5. Solaris, OpenSolaris, and derivatives
118 The following linker error has been reported on some x86 systems:
120 ld: fatal: relocation error: R_386_GOTOFF: ...
122 This can be worked around by passing gl_cv_cc_visibility=no
123 as an argument to the configure script.
125 test_scripts.sh in "make check" may fail if good enough tools are
126 missing from PATH (/usr/xpg4/bin or /usr/xpg6/bin). See sections
127 4.5 and 3.2 for more information.
132 If you try to use the native C compiler on Tru64 (passing CC=cc to
133 configure), you may need the workaround mention in section 4.1 in
134 this file (pass also ac_cv_prog_cc_c99= to configure).
139 Building XZ Utils on Windows is supported under MinGW + MSYS,
140 MinGW-w64 + MSYS, and Cygwin. There is windows/build.bash to
141 ease packaging XZ Utils with MinGW(-w64) + MSYS into a
142 redistributable .zip or .7z file. See windows/INSTALL-Windows.txt
143 for more information.
145 It may be possible to build liblzma with other toolchains too, but
146 that will probably require writing a separate makefile. Building
147 the command line tools with non-GNU toolchains will be harder than
148 building only liblzma.
150 Starting with XZ Utils 5.2.0, building liblzma (not the whole
151 XZ Utils) should work with MSVC 2013 update 2 or later using
152 windows/config.h. No project files or makefiles are included yet,
153 so the build process isn't as convenient yet as it could be.
155 Even if liblzma is built with MinGW(-w64), the resulting DLL can
156 be used by other compilers and linkers, including MSVC. See
157 windows/README-Windows.txt for details.
162 There is an experimental Makefile in the "dos" directory to build
163 XZ Utils on DOS using DJGPP. Support for long file names (LFN) is
164 needed. See dos/README for more information.
166 GNU Autotools based build hasn't been tried on DOS. If you try, I
167 would like to hear if it worked.
170 1.3. Adding support for new platforms
172 If you have written patches to make XZ Utils to work on previously
173 unsupported platform, please send the patches to me! I will consider
174 including them to the official version. It's nice to minimize the
175 need of third-party patching.
177 One exception: Don't request or send patches to change the whole
178 source package to C89. I find C99 substantially nicer to write and
179 maintain. However, the public library headers must be in C89 to
180 avoid frustrating those who maintain programs, which are strictly
187 In most cases, the defaults are what you want. Many of the options
188 below are useful only when building a size-optimized version of
189 liblzma or command line tools.
191 --enable-encoders=LIST
193 Specify a comma-separated LIST of filter encoders to
194 build. See "./configure --help" for exact list of
195 available filter encoders. The default is to build all
198 If LIST is empty or --disable-encoders is used, no filter
199 encoders will be built and also the code shared between
200 encoders will be omitted.
202 Disabling encoders will remove some symbols from the
203 liblzma ABI, so this option should be used only when it
204 is known to not cause problems.
206 --enable-decoders=LIST
208 This is like --enable-encoders but for decoders. The
209 default is to build all supported decoders.
211 --enable-match-finders=LIST
212 liblzma includes two categories of match finders:
213 hash chains and binary trees. Hash chains (hc3 and hc4)
214 are quite fast but they don't provide the best compression
215 ratio. Binary trees (bt2, bt3 and bt4) give excellent
216 compression ratio, but they are slower and need more
217 memory than hash chains.
219 You need to enable at least one match finder to build the
220 LZMA1 or LZMA2 filter encoders. Usually hash chains are
221 used only in the fast mode, while binary trees are used to
222 when the best compression ratio is wanted.
224 The default is to build all the match finders if LZMA1
225 or LZMA2 filter encoders are being built.
228 liblzma support multiple integrity checks. CRC32 is
229 mandatory, and cannot be omitted. See "./configure --help"
230 for exact list of available integrity check types.
232 liblzma and the command line tools can decompress files
233 which use unsupported integrity check type, but naturally
234 the file integrity cannot be verified in that case.
236 Disabling integrity checks may remove some symbols from
237 the liblzma ABI, so this option should be used only when
238 it is known to not cause problems.
244 Don't build and install the command line tool mentioned
247 NOTE: Disabling xz will skip some tests in "make check".
249 NOTE: If xzdec is disabled and lzmadec is left enabled,
250 a dangling man page symlink lzmadec.1 -> xzdec.1 is
254 Don't create symlinks for LZMA Utils compatibility.
255 This includes lzma, unlzma, and lzcat. If scripts are
256 installed, also lzdiff, lzcmp, lzgrep, lzegrep, lzfgrep,
257 lzmore, and lzless will be omitted if this option is used.
260 Don't install the scripts xzdiff, xzgrep, xzmore, xzless,
264 Don't install the documentation files to $docdir
265 (often /usr/doc/xz or /usr/local/doc/xz). Man pages
266 will still be installed. The $docdir can be changed
270 liblzma includes some assembler optimizations. Currently
271 there is only assembler code for CRC32 and CRC64 for
274 All the assembler code in liblzma is position-independent
275 code, which is suitable for use in shared libraries and
276 position-independent executables. So far only i386
277 instructions are used, but the code is optimized for i686
278 class CPUs. If you are compiling liblzma exclusively for
279 pre-i686 systems, you may want to disable the assembler
282 --enable-unaligned-access
283 Allow liblzma to use unaligned memory access for 16-bit
284 and 32-bit loads and stores. This should be enabled only
285 when the hardware supports this, i.e. when unaligned
286 access is fast. Some operating system kernels emulate
287 unaligned access, which is extremely slow. This option
288 shouldn't be used on systems that rely on such emulation.
290 Unaligned access is enabled by default on x86, x86-64,
291 and big endian PowerPC.
294 Reduce the size of liblzma by selecting smaller but
295 semantically equivalent version of some functions, and
296 omit precomputed lookup tables. This option tends to
297 make liblzma slightly slower.
299 Note that while omitting the precomputed tables makes
300 liblzma smaller on disk, the tables are still needed at
301 run time, and need to be computed at startup. This also
302 means that the RAM holding the tables won't be shared
303 between applications linked against shared liblzma.
305 This option doesn't modify CFLAGS to tell the compiler
306 to optimize for size. You need to add -Os or equivalent
307 flag(s) to CFLAGS manually.
309 --enable-assume-ram=SIZE
310 On the most common operating systems, XZ Utils is able to
311 detect the amount of physical memory on the system. This
312 information is used by the options --memlimit-compress,
313 --memlimit-decompress, and --memlimit when setting the
314 limit to a percentage of total RAM.
316 On some systems, there is no code to detect the amount of
317 RAM though. Using --enable-assume-ram one can set how much
318 memory to assume on these systems. SIZE is given as MiB.
319 The default is 128 MiB.
321 Feel free to send patches to add support for detecting
322 the amount of RAM on the operating system you use. See
323 src/common/tuklib_physmem.c for details.
325 --enable-threads=METHOD
326 Threading support is enabled by default so normally there
327 is no need to specify this option.
329 Supported values for METHOD:
331 yes Autodetect the threading method. If none
332 is found, configure will give an error.
334 posix Use POSIX pthreads. This is the default
335 except on Windows outside Cygwin.
337 win95 Use Windows 95 compatible threads. This
338 is compatible with Windows XP and later
339 too. This is the default for 32-bit x86
340 Windows builds. The `win95' threading is
341 incompatible with --enable-small.
343 vista Use Windows Vista compatible threads. The
344 resulting binaries won't run on Windows XP
345 or older. This is the default for Windows
346 excluding 32-bit x86 builds (that is, on
347 x86-64 the default is `vista').
349 no Disable threading support. This is the
350 same as using --disable-threads.
351 NOTE: If combined with --enable-small, the
352 resulting liblzma won't be thread safe,
353 that is, if a multi-threaded application
354 calls any liblzma functions from more than
355 one thread, something bad may happen.
357 --enable-symbol-versions
358 Use symbol versioning for liblzma. This is enabled by
359 default on GNU/Linux, other GNU-based systems, and
363 This enables the assert() macro and possibly some other
364 run-time consistency checks. It makes the code slower, so
365 you normally don't want to have this enabled.
368 If building with GCC, make all compiler warnings an error,
369 that abort the compilation. This may help catching bugs,
370 and should work on most systems. This has no effect on the
374 2.1. Static vs. dynamic linking of liblzma
376 On 32-bit x86, linking against static liblzma can give a minor
377 speed improvement. Static libraries on x86 are usually compiled as
378 position-dependent code (non-PIC) and shared libraries are built as
379 position-independent code (PIC). PIC wastes one register, which can
380 make the code slightly slower compared to a non-PIC version. (Note
381 that this doesn't apply to x86-64.)
383 If you want to link xz against static liblzma, the simplest way
384 is to pass --disable-shared to configure. If you want also shared
385 liblzma, run configure again and run "make install" only for
389 2.2. Optimizing xzdec and lzmadec
391 xzdec and lzmadec are intended to be relatively small instead of
392 optimizing for the best speed. Thus, it is a good idea to build
393 xzdec and lzmadec separately:
395 - To link the tools against static liblzma, pass --disable-shared
398 - To select somewhat size-optimized variant of some things in
399 liblzma, pass --enable-small to configure.
401 - Tell the compiler to optimize for size instead of speed.
402 E.g. with GCC, put -Os into CFLAGS.
404 - xzdec and lzmadec will never use multithreading capabilities of
405 liblzma. You can avoid dependency on libpthread by passing
406 --disable-threads to configure.
408 - There are and will be no translated messages for xzdec and
409 lzmadec, so it is fine to pass also --disable-nls to configure.
411 - Only decoder code is needed, so you can speed up the build
412 slightly by passing --disable-encoders to configure. This
413 shouldn't affect the final size of the executables though,
414 because the linker is able to omit the encoder code anyway.
416 If you have no use for xzdec or lzmadec, you can disable them with
417 --disable-xzdec and --disable-lzmadec.
420 3. xzgrep and other scripts
421 ---------------------------
425 POSIX shell (sh) and bunch of other standard POSIX tools are required
426 to run the scripts. The configure script tries to find a POSIX
427 compliant sh, but if it fails, you can force the shell by passing
428 gl_cv_posix_shell=/path/to/posix-sh as an argument to the configure
431 xzdiff (xzcmp/lzdiff/lzcmp) may use mktemp if it is available. As
432 a fallback xzdiff will use mkdir to securely create a temporary
433 directory. Having mktemp available is still recommended since the
434 mkdir fallback method isn't as robust as mktemp is. The original
435 mktemp can be found from <http://www.mktemp.org/>. On GNU, most will
436 use the mktemp program from GNU coreutils instead of the original
437 implementation. Both mktemp versions are fine.
439 In addition to using xz to decompress .xz files, xzgrep and xzdiff
440 use gzip, bzip2, and lzop to support .gz, bz2, and .lzo files.
445 The scripts assume that the required tools (standard POSIX utilities,
446 mktemp, and xz) are in PATH; the scripts don't set the PATH themselves.
447 Some people like this while some think this is a bug. Those in the
448 latter group can easily patch the scripts before running the configure
449 script by taking advantage of a placeholder line in the scripts.
451 For example, to make the scripts prefix /usr/bin:/bin to PATH:
453 perl -pi -e 's|^#SET_PATH.*$|PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:\$PATH|' \
460 4.1. "No C99 compiler was found."
462 You need a C99 compiler to build XZ Utils. If the configure script
463 cannot find a C99 compiler and you think you have such a compiler
464 installed, set the compiler command by passing CC=/path/to/c99 as
465 an argument to the configure script.
467 If you get this error even when you think your compiler supports C99,
468 you can override the test by passing ac_cv_prog_cc_c99= as an argument
469 to the configure script. The test for C99 compiler is not perfect (and
470 it is not as easy to make it perfect as it sounds), so sometimes this
471 may be needed. You will get a compile error if your compiler doesn't
475 4.2. "No POSIX conforming shell (sh) was found."
477 xzgrep and other scripts need a shell that (roughly) conforms
478 to POSIX. The configure script tries to find such a shell. If
479 it fails, you can force the shell to be used by passing
480 gl_cv_posix_shell=/path/to/posix-sh as an argument to the configure
481 script. Alternatively you can omit the installation of scripts and
482 this error by passing --disable-scripts to configure.
485 4.3. configure works but build fails at crc32_x86.S
487 The easy fix is to pass --disable-assembler to the configure script.
489 The configure script determines if assembler code can be used by
490 looking at the configure triplet; there is currently no check if
491 the assembler code can actually actually be built. The x86 assembler
492 code should work on x86 GNU/Linux, *BSDs, Solaris, Darwin, MinGW,
493 Cygwin, and DJGPP. On other x86 systems, there may be problems and
494 the assembler code may need to be disabled with the configure option.
496 If you get this error when building for x86-64, you have specified or
497 the configure script has misguessed your architecture. Pass the
498 correct configure triplet using the --build=CPU-COMPANY-SYSTEM option
499 (see INSTALL.generic).
502 4.4. Lots of warnings about symbol visibility
504 On some systems where symbol visibility isn't supported, GCC may
505 still accept the visibility options and attributes, which will make
506 configure think that visibility is supported. This will result in
507 many compiler warnings. You can avoid the warnings by forcing the
508 visibility support off by passing gl_cv_cc_visibility=no as an
509 argument to the configure script. This has no effect on the
510 resulting binaries, but fewer warnings looks nicer and may allow
511 using --enable-werror.
514 4.5. "make check" fails
516 If the other tests pass but test_scripts.sh fails, then the problem
517 is in the scripts in src/scripts. Comparing the contents of
518 tests/xzgrep_test_output to tests/xzgrep_expected_output might
519 give a good idea about problems in xzgrep. One possibility is that
520 some tools are missing from the current PATH or the tools lack
521 support for some POSIX features. This can happen at least on
522 Solaris where the tools in /bin may be ancient but good enough
523 tools are available in /usr/xpg4/bin or /usr/xpg6/bin. One fix
524 for this problem is described in section 3.2 of this file.
526 If tests other than test_scripts.sh fail, a likely reason is that
527 libtool links the test programs against an installed version of
528 liblzma instead of the version that was just built. This is
529 obviously a bug which seems to happen on some platforms.
530 A workaround is to uninstall the old liblzma versions first.
532 If the problem isn't any of those described above, then it's likely
533 a bug in XZ Utils or in the compiler. See the platform-specific
534 notes in this file for possible known problems. Please report
535 a bug if you cannot solve the problem. See README for contact
539 4.6. liblzma.so (or similar) not found when running xz
541 If you installed the package with "make install" and get an error
542 about liblzma.so (or a similarly named file) being missing, try
543 running "ldconfig" to update the run-time linker cache (if your
544 operating system has such a command).