[SOLVED] pyinstaller and upx on Linux - no difference in exe size

pyinstaller and upx on Linux - no difference in exe size

I'm building a project with this script on Xubuntu 20.04.

pyinstaller --distpath $OUTPUT_DIR \
        --name $APP_NAME \
        --onefile \
        --hidden-import numpy \
        --hidden-import zmq \
        --hidden-import cv2 \
        --clean \
        --upx-dir "/home/developer/Downloads/upx-3.96-amd64_linux/" \
        --log-level DEBUG \
        main.py

Having the upx-dir option or not does not influence the size of the output file (in this case ~320MB). The same command run on Windows works fine. The debug output shows that the UPX module has been found:

623 INFO: PyInstaller: 4.2
623 INFO: Python: 3.8.5 (conda)
646 INFO: Platform: Linux-5.4.0-65-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.10
646 INFO: wrote /home/developer/projects/build/linux_host/pyinstaller_build/MyProject.spec
646 DEBUG: Testing for UPX ...
686 INFO: UPX is available.

Any suggestions ?

Solution

UPX is disabled on non-Windows due to known compatibility problems. From the source code of pyinstaller:

Disable UPX on non-Windows. Using UPX (3.96) on modern Linux shared libraries (for example, the python3.x.so shared library) seems to result in segmentation fault when they are dlopen'd. This happens in recent versions of Fedora and Ubuntu linux, as well as in Alpine containers. On macOS, UPX (3.96) fails with UnknownExecutableFormatException on most .dylibs (and interferes with code signature on other occasions). And even when it would succeed, compressed libraries cannot be (re)signed due to failed strict validation.