Parallel BZIP2 for OpenVMS

Ported by
Alexey Chupahin
alexey(AT)vaxman(DOT)de


PBZIP2 is a parallel implementation by Jeff Gilchrist of the bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses pthreads and achieves near-linear speedup on SMP machines. The output of this version is fully compatible with bzip2 v1.0.2 or newer (ie: anything compressed with pbzip2 can be decompressed with bzip2)
PBZIP2 for OpenVMS should work under OpenVMS since 7.3 on multiprocessor system Alpha or Itanium.
Porting to VAX is possible if such offers will be for me.
Software has been tested on dual-processor Itanium rx1620 and presented sufficient speed incrementation.


License/Disclaimer

This software is distributed under a BSD-style license. For details, see the file COPYING. Use at your own risk. I take no responsibility for anything that happens to your data or equipment. Always test (bzip2 -tv) a compressed file containing important data before deleting the original to verify the compression was successful.

If you find this software useful or you are using it in a government/business/commercial environment,
please consider making a donation to help support future improvements:


Current release is: 1.1.4


Major changelog since release 1.0.5:

* Added -m switch to specify amount of max memory usage before throttling starts (default 100MB)
* Added long options
* Many bugs fixed

Major changelog since release 1.0.4:

* Now properly complains about trying to read or write compressed data to terminal, and exits

Major changelog since release 1.0.2:

* Various bugs when compressing binary files are fixed. Now it compress and decompress binaries with any RMS attributes correctly;
* Added support for STDIN/STDOUT compression/decompression;
* All remainig options of bzip2 are supported, now bzip2 can be replaced with pbzip2 safely;


Download

Click to download the latest version:
Source Code: PBZIP2 v1.1.4 VMS (23 KB)

BZIP2 1.0.5A should be installed before compilation.
Please download it from OpenVMS Clamav porting project
Compilation process is very simple and looks like in unix one:
$@configure
$@build
$@pbzip2$startup

Pre-built Packages
Itanium OpenVMS 8.3 PBZIP2.EXE_I64
Alpha OpenVMS 7.3-2 PBZIP2.EXE_AXP

ToDo

- Add support for splitter archives closer to RAR