Facebook Looking To Add Zstd Support To The Linux Kernel, Btrfs

Zstd (also known as Zstandard) is a lossless data compression developed by Facebook that has been open-source since last year. This BSD-licensed compression algorithm aims to offer compression similar to zip/gzip but with faster speeds both for compression and decompression. Facebook developers are now looking at adding this support to the Linux kernel.

Nick Terrell of Facebook has proposed adding xxhash and zstd compression/decompression support to the Linux kernel. Beyond adding the new zstd compress/decompress module, there's support added to Btrfs and SquashFS for their native file-system compression support. In regards to xxhash, it's a non-crypto hashing algorithm for checksumming and is used by zstd.

The patch series goes into more detail about zstd for the Linux kernel, including benchmarks. The Btrfs results certainly looking promising for Zstd compression as an alternative to LZO and Zlib.

Terrell had wrote about the zstd performance potential, "zstd offers a wide varity of compression speed and quality trade-offs. It can compress at speeds approaching lz4, and quality approaching lzma. zstd decompressions at speeds more than twice as fast as zlib, and decompression speed remains roughly the same across all compression levels."