Fedora To Possibly Transition From Zlib To Zlib-NG For Better Performance

Fedora Linux is looking at possibly transitioning from Zlib to Zlib-NG for this widely-used compression library. This tentative change request is filed in part by Intel software engineers looking to enhance the Zlib performance on modern processors.

Zlib-NG continues to be developed as a modern fork of Zlib and more quickly adopting new CPU ISA features and other optimizations. With Zlib-ng there is AVX2 / AVX-512 optimizations for various functions among other newer x86_64 instruction set features. Plus there's also Arm Neon optimizations, some IBM Z optimizations, and other modern CPU ISA features for other processor architectures. Plus Zlib-NG carries some additional optimization work from the likes of Intel and Cloudflare.

In order to better utilize modern processor capabilities, a change request is being worked on that will target Fedora 40 to replace Zlib with the zlib-ng code. This should largely be a drop-in replacement except for any tests / software expecting 1:1 output as opposed to just verifying if it's valid Zlib-compressed output.

Ali Erdinc Koroglu of Intel's Linux OS Systems Engineering team has posted the Fedora change draft proposal to the mailing list for some discussion.There is also a Copr repository setup for those wanting to experiment with a Fedora Zlib-NG deployment.

The draft Fedora Zlib-NG change proposal can be found on the Fedora Wiki. The proposal still needs to undergo Fedora community discussion and voting by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) before it's potentially accepted for Fedora 40 ahead of its debut next spring.