upx compatibility(Cannot pack after postject-ed)

[y3k00000]

I followed NodeJS Official SEA instructions and ended up with an executable that seems works fine.

After that I was advancing to pack the postject-ed executable with upx packer but it turns out to be failing with an error:

while the original node executable can be packed fine.

Don't know what's happening, I wonder is this a limitation or why is this be happening?

[RaisinTen]

Okay, so you're trying this on an ELF binary and https://github.com/upx/upx/blob/dae45ae0d4e569e071279bac1693a447934a1363/src/p_lx_elf.cpp#L2544-L2547 is where the error is coming from.

while the original node executable can be packed fine.

Could you confirm if the packed original node executable also runs without errors? (I'm asking because I just tried using upx 4.0.2 from brew on the original Node.js v20.2.0 official x86_64 macOS binary and it looks like upx works without errors but running the resultant executable segfaults)

Also, does passing the --force-execve option to upx, as suggested in the error, help in any way?

[HCLonely]

It works fine on windows, but I had the same problem on linux.

And the original node executable works fine on both systems.

It was tested on

NodeJS: v21.6.2
UPX: v4.2.2
OS: Windows 11 Pro 23H2 & Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS

[ddadaal]

Can confirm this in Linux Node 22 and 23. Node binary itself can be upx-ed and works fine, but postject-ed SEA fails to run with bad e_phoff.

[Sfinx]

See the upx/upx#892