A port I recently submitted to the OpenBSD mailing list has been accepted and imported into the official ports tree. This will make it possible to install lrzip on OpenBSD using the regular software management tools.
lrzip, which stands for Long Range Zip, is a compression utility designed to compress big archives. It works best in systems that have big amounts of RAM at their disposal and excels at deduplicating data blocks.
The current port which is the object of this post has been modified to cooperate with OpenBSD’s system for allocating RAM quotas to users. By default, OpenBSD does not give users access to all the memory available in the machine. On the other hand, lrzip tries to use as much physical RAM as possible. This caused lrzip to attempt to allocate more RAM than the Operating System was configured to concede. After my patches, lrzip will allocate only the memory allowed by OpenBSD and no more… unless configured to do otherwise.