Hey all, I was able to attend the Rust All Hands this year, and this is a write up of a cool project I worked on there. Let me know if you have any questions!
The article mentions the Flash storage size at 8meg. What was the ram size of the target?
UPX can be a bit of mixed bag. It doesn't necessarily cause load delays, If decompression is faster than data loading it can actually speed things. You can't mmap it though which could be an issue depending on RAM. If using an underlying compressed filesystem it might be providing on-paper-only gains.
It would be interesting to see breakdowns of the size of the text and data section at each stage of the size optimization.
