XZ 5.8 is out today as the first notable feature release since last year's [1]malicious backdoor in XZ 5.6 inserted by a then-co-maintainer of the project. [2]XZ 5.6.2 was out last May while XZ 5.8.0 is now stable today for bringing new features to this lossless data compressor project.

With liblzma when built for x86 or x86_64 architectures, SSE2 intrinsics are now attempted instead of memcpy() for the LZMA/LZMA2 decoder. This SSE2 intrinsic use can yield up to 5% reduced decompression times. Or if building against the musl C library, these SSE2 intrinsics can lead to an over 15% time reduction for highly compressed files.

In addition to the XZ 5.8 SSE2 intrinsics use for liblzma, there are also CMake build system updates, language translation updates, improved LZMA/LZMA2 encoder performance for 64-bit POWER and RISC-V, rewriting of the x86_64 E2K CLMUL CRC code, and other optimizations.

The XZ 5.8 update was managed by Lasse Collin and can be downloaded from the official [3]XZ project site .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/XZ-CVE-2024-3094

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/XZ-5.6.2-Released

[3] https://tukaani.org/xz/#_source_packages