Re: Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor

[wrotycz]

> lz4 and zstd are quite a bit less resource-hungry than xz

Is it?

By default, and up to -19 level, zstd uses 8 MiB (sliding) window, when xz uses 8 MiB at level 6, which is default, default and doubles is every next level. More over that, xz compression with 8 MiB window uses 96 MiB of memory, when zstd needs 272 MiB at level 19, 224 MiB at lv. 16 and 232 MiB at lv. 12.

Similarily with decompression - xz needs 11 MiB to decompress archive with 8 MiB window, zstd needs 30 MiB to decompress it.

I don't see where zstd is 'less resource-hungry than xz'.

> With these options, the zst tarball came withing a hare's breath of the xz compressed file size.

Here are some samples of about 8 MB files compressed with bzip2, gzip, xz and zstd with different levels of compression:

paste.ee/p/tVIWG

paste.ee/p/PsNrx

> I did not find any drawbacks.

Except higher memory requirements, lower compression, similar issues with long term archiving usefulness, 'there are no drawbacks'.