Serge,

Thanks for the feedback. These are good points. I haven't thought about the VM implications before.

Still, I feel that UPX would be appropriate for most applications. The difference between N810 and a typical linux computer is that the amount of device storage is extremely limited -- 100MB of free space vs. hundreds of gigabytes. By packing just a few binaries (especially those you don't use very frequently), you can save a few MB of valuable space. A typical 1MB binary can be compressed to about 250K.

About paging -- it appears that most IT applications are meant to be run as a single instance. Think about maemo mapper, quiver, most games, etc. It really wouldn't make sense to start them multiple times. I am also not sure how big a penalty it is that pages cannot be fetched from the file image on disk. It seems to me that internet tablets usually don't max out the available memory, so paging is not necessary. On the plus side, UPX applications can run faster, because no code needs to be fetched from disk after an application is started.

Also, please note that UPX doesn't handle shared libraries, only ELF executables.