XZ 5.6 Released: Sandboxing Improvements, Prefers -O2 Instead Of -O3

XZ Utils 5.6 was released today for this general purpose data compression library that also provides the common XZ command-line utilities for .xz format handling.

With the XZ 5.6 release Landlock is now used when XZ needs to create files, the Landlock and pledge sandboxing integration is stricter when reading from more than one input file, and support for Landlock ABI version 4 as part of the sandboxing enhancements.

XZ 5.6 now also sets the "-O2" compiler optimization level rather than "-O3" when compiling release binaries. While -O3 is a higher optimization level and should yield faster binaries, in practice XZ developers have found that -O3 isn't useful for them with speed improvements and leads to larger binary sizes.

The XZ 5.6 release also now has CMake building lzmainfo and lzmadec, the CMake build system integration is close in feature parity to its Autotools build scripts, and the Windows installation support and documentation has been improved.

Downloads and more details on today's XZ 5.6 release via the project site.