Zstd 1.5.6 Released - Celebrating Google Chrome Support For Zstandard Encoding

Meta's Yann Collet just released Zstd 1.5.6 as the newest version of this Zstandard compression implementation. This release is driven in part by Google Chrome 123 adding support for Zstd encoding for web traffic. Chrome now allows Zstandard (zstd) for the content-encoding to speed-up page load speeds and bandwidth savings.

While Chrome embracing Zstd encoding is great, at this time there is limited web server support for Zstd encoding. The hope with the Zstd 1.5.6 release is that the new version will motivate greater adoption by web browsers as well as continued embrace by other software.

Zstd 1.5.6 brings a new stable parameter "ZSTD_c_targetCBlockSize" for better handling incremental updates within web browsers, granular binary size selection, and a variety of other enhancements. Zstd 1.5.6 also now better supports SPARC64, ARM64EC, and RISC-V architectures as well as the QNX, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX operating systems.

Plus there are a variety of other random enhancements and bug fixes to find with Zstd 1.5.6. Downloads and more details on the brand new Zstd 1.5.6 release via GitHub.

Hopefully this new Zstd 1.5.6 will motivate a new update for the upstream Linux kernel use... There had been plans for Zstd 1.5.5 for Linux 6.8 but it never ended up being submitted for Linux 6.8 and no pull requests were sent in for the recent 6.9 merge window. Hopefully Zstd 1.5.6 will manage to make it into the mainline kernel for 6.10 or without too much waiting.