xz-5.8.0

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

XZ Utils Release Notes

5.8.0 (2025-03-25)

This bumps the minor version of liblzma because new features were added. The API and ABI are still backward compatible with liblzma 5.6.x, 5.4.x, 5.2.x, and 5.0.x.

• liblzma on 32/64-bit x86: When possible, use SSE2 intrinsics instead of memcpy() in the LZMA/LZMA2 decoder. In typical cases, this may reduce decompression time by 0-5 %. However, when built against musl libc, over 15 % time reduction was observed with highly compressed files.

• CMake: Make the feature test macros match the Autotools-based build on NetBSD, Darwin, and mingw-w64.

• Update the Croatian, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian translations.

• Update the German, Italian, Korean, Romanian, Serbian, and Ukrainian man page translations.

Summary of changes in the 5.7.x development releases:

• Mark the following LZMA Utils script aliases as deprecated: lzcmp, lzdiff, lzless, lzmore, lzgrep, lzegrep, and lzfgrep.

• liblzma:

• Improve LZMA/LZMA2 encoder speed on 64-bit PowerPC (both endiannesses) and those 64-bit RISC-V processors that support fast unaligned access.

• Add low-level APIs for RISC-V, ARM64, and x86 BCJ filters to lzma/bcj.h. These are primarily for erofs-utils.

• x86/x86-64/E2K CLMUL CRC code was rewritten.

• Use the CRC32 instructions on LoongArch.

• xz:

• Synchronize the output file and its directory using fsync() before deleting the input file. No syncing is done when xz isn't going to delete the input file.

• Add --no-sync to disable the sync-before-delete behavior.

• Make --single-stream imply --keep.

• xz, xzdec, lzmainfo: When printing messages, replace non-printable characters with question marks.

• xz and xzdec on Linux: Support Landlock ABI versions 5 and 6.

• CMake: Revise the configuration variables and some of their options, and document them in the file INSTALL. CMake support is no longer experimental. (It was already not experimental when building for native Windows.)

• Add build-aux/license-check.sh.

5.7.2beta (2025-03-08)

• On the man pages, mark the following LZMA Utils script aliases as deprecated: lzcmp, lzdiff, lzless, lzmore, lzgrep, lzegrep, and lzfgrep. The commands that start with xz* instead of lz* have identical behavior.

The LZMA Utils aliases lzma, unlzma, and lzcat aren't deprecated because some of these aliases are still in common use. lzmadec and lzmainfo aren't deprecated either.

• xz: In the ENVIRONMENT section of the man page, warn about problems that some uses of XZ_DEFAULTS and XZ_OPT may create.

• Windows (native builds, not Cygwin): In xz, xzdec, and lzmadec, avoid an error message on broken pipe.

• Autotools: Fix out-of-tree builds when using the bundled getopt_long.

• Translations:

• Updated: Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Finnish, Georgian, German, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian

• Added: Dutch

• Man page translations:

• Updated: German, Korean, Romanian, and Ukrainian

• Added: Italian and Serbian

5.7.1alpha (2025-01-23)

• All fixes from 5.6.4.

• liblzma:

• Improve LZMA/LZMA2 encoder speed on 64-bit PowerPC (both endiannesses) and those 64-bit RISC-V processors that support fast unaligned access.

• x86/x86-64/E2K CLMUL CRC code was rewritten. It's faster and doesn't cause false positives from sanitizers. Attributes like attribute((no_sanitize_address)) are no longer present.

• On 32-bit x86, CLMUL CRC and the old (but still good) assembly versions now co-exist with runtime detection. Both Autotools and CMake build systems handle this automatically now.

• Use the CRC32 instructions on LoongArch to make CRC32 calculation faster.

• Add low-level APIs for RISC-V, ARM64, and x86 BCJ filters to lzma/bcj.h. These are primarily for erofs-utils.

• Minor tweaks to ARM64 CRC32 code and BCJ filters were made.

• xz:

• Synchronize the output file and its directory before deleting the input file using fsync(). This reduces the probability of data loss after a system crash. However, it can be a major performance hit if processing many small files.

NOTE: No syncing is done when xz isn't going to delete the input file.

• Add a new option --no-sync to disable the sync-before-delete behavior. It's useful when compressing many small files and one doesn't worry about data loss in case of a system crash.

• Make --single-stream imply --keep.

• Use automatic word wrapping for the text in --help and similar situations to hopefully make the strings easier for majority of translators (no need to count spaces anymore).

• xz, xzdec, lzmainfo: When printing messages, replace non-printable characters with question marks. This way malicious filenames cannot be used to send escape sequences to a terminal. This change is also applied to filenames shown in "xz --robot --list".

• xz and xzdec on Linux: Add support for Landlock ABI versions 5 and 6.

• CMake updates:

• Increase the minimum required CMake version to 3.20.

• Revise the configuration variables and some of their options. Document them in the file INSTALL.

• Attempt to produce liblzma.pc so that the paths are based on ${prefix}, which makes it simpler to override the paths if the liblzma files have been moved.

• To enable translations, gettext-tools is now required. The CMake build no longer supports installing pre-compiled message catalog binary files (po/*.gmo).

• Apple: Use Mach-O shared library versioning that is compatible with GNU Libtool. This should make it easier to switch between the build systems on Apple OSes that enforce the correct compatibility_version (macOS >= 12 doesn't?). This change is backward compatible: binaries linked against old CMake-built liblzma will run with liblzma that uses Libtool style versioning.

• Windows (not Cygwin): Document CMAKE_DLL_NAME_WITH_SOVERSION (CMake >= 3.27) in the file INSTALL. This option should usually be left to its default value (OFF). It can be set to ON if the liblzma DLL filename must be compatible with the versioned filename produced by GNU Libtool. For example, binaries distributed in MSYS2 use a versioned DLL filename.

• CMake support is no longer experimental. (It was already not experimental when building for native Windows.)

• Windows: Building liblzma with Visual Studio 2013 is no longer supported. Visual Studio 2015 or later (with CMake) can be used to build liblzma and the command line tools.

• Add preliminary Georgian translation. This already contains translations of most of the strings that are now automatically word wrapped.

• Add build-aux/license-check.sh. Without arguments, it checks that no license information has been forgotten. With the -v argument, it shows the license info (or the lack of it) for each file.

If the .git directory is available, only the files in the repository are checked. Without the .git directory, a clean tree from an extracted release tarball is expected.