Fedora 31 Considers Compressing Their RPM Packages With Zstd Rather Than XZ

[shmerl]

Anecdotal, but it shows that multithreaded xz decompression isn't very useful while multithreaded compression is more useful overall, ~6x faster when compressing the linux 5.1 sources.

Try pixz. (Compress and decompress with it).

[shmerl]

man xz gives me this:

Currently the only threading method is to split the input into blocks and compress them independently from each other. The default block size depends on the compression
level and can be overriden with the --block-size=size option.

Threaded decompression hasn't been implemented yet. It will only work on files that contain multiple blocks with size information in block headers. All files compressed in multi-threaded mode meet this condition, but files compressed in single-threaded mode don't even if --block-size=size is used.

pixz implements this already. I suppose xz will eventually get there as well. No wonder Fedora wants to replace xz decompression with something faster.

[rene]

gone zstd compressed packages two years ago, ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQee4IDoUow

[pkunk]

i remember some Fedora Dev saying how XZ was Crap, i just dont remember his arguments on it, an im pretty sure RPM5 had ZSTD in it, an im pretty sure it was Jeff Johnson that made the RFE for RPM4 to also have it once RPM5 was trashed

There is some critique of xz format: https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html biased of course but not necessary untrue.

[skeevy420]

Try pixz. (Compress and decompress with it).

Maybe later today if I have the time.

[Compartmentalisation]

Big yes! zstd is so fast at decompression. I use it for pretty much everything!

Optimistic merging time please!


Edit: there are the 2 types of Fedora users. The one type who likes to run dnf update while the system is running, so then it's much safer when files are more quickly replaced. Like your Firefox or LibreOffice, or what have you. The second group is the people who select the option "install updates on poweroff" or whatever that was in the Workstation edition, and with zstd they can select that option on their laptops and put the laptop in their bags because the update process takes much shorter. For the ones who do that on a desktop computer it means the fans go off quicker at the end of the day.

[aht0]

FYI Linus Torvalds is supposedly Fedora user.
That Teletubbies cartoon might apply to users of Debian.