LLVM Begins Landing Support For Zstd Compressed ELF Debug Sections (ELFCOMPRESS_ZSTD)

Following the news from this summer of Zstd compression being eyed for use within LLVM, the code has begun being merged to allow for Zstd-compressed ELF debug sections as an alternative to the long-used Zlib.

ELFCOMPRESS_ZSTD was recently proposed -- and then successfully added -- to the System V ABI specification. With that toolchain developers have now been working on adding Zstd compression for ELF debug sections to provide better compression in terms of compression/decompression speed and the compression ratio.

As of Friday the work has begun to be merged into LLVM with --compress-debug-sections=zstd support and support for ELFCOMPRESS_ZSTD input.

This blog post by developer Fangrui Song "MaskRay" who has been working on some of these LLVM patches has detailed more of the effort invested this year into ELFCOMPRESS_ZSTD as a superior alternative to Zlib for ELF debug sections.