In addition to Usama Arif's recent Linux patches for [1]addressing a major inefficiency within the Linux kernel's Zstd compression code , he also has a separate patch series destined for Linux 7.4 to further enhance the Zstd compression/decompression performance by avoiding redundant initialization.

Usama recently posted the patches to avoid redundant cstream and dstream initialization. He noticed there was an extra initialization with the first initialization being discarded without ever processing any data. With the new patches, stream initialization is deferred to the first walk iteration.

With the two patches, the [2]cover letter shows off some significant improvements in a 4KB crypto_acomp benchmark run. Single digit improvements to the Zstd compression speed and 13% decompression speed-up on bare metal or 35% within a VM:

The two patches were picked up this week into the [3]cryptodev Git branch . With the patches now in the cryptography subsystem's development branch, they should be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/In-Kernel-Zstd-BMI2-Probing

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260825220616.3842633-1-usama.arif@linux.dev/

[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/cryptodev-2.6.git/log/