Fedora To Possibly Transition From Zlib To Zlib-NG For Better Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora To Possibly Transition From Zlib To Zlib-NG For Better Performance

Fedora Linux is looking at possibly transitioning from Zlib to Zlib-NG for this widely-used compression library. This tentative change request is filed in part by Intel software engineers looking to enhance the Zlib performance on modern processors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Possible-Zlib-NG

[juxuanu]

The only breakage I found when I started using this library in ArchLinux was that the Python2 tests failed.

[CommunityMember]

The only breakage I found when I started using this library in ArchLinux was that the Python2 tests failed.

There are apparently a couple of tests in applications which expected a specific result from zlib (which was always somewhat fragile) which zlib-ng is triggering in the testing that has been done.

[V1tol]

The only breakage I found when I started using this library in ArchLinux was that the Python2 tests failed.

Can confirm it works great for some time already, especially since I don't use Python 2.

[mirmirmir]

I bet they wrote it in rust

[RahulSundaram]

I bet they wrote it in rust

You lost that bet. It's a fork of the existing Zlib library with performance patches. Not a rewrite.

[ms178]

In my own testing on Arch, the only noticed issue was the updating of rust crates, somehow fetching the updates from the crates fails with zlib-ng. This affects custom proton builds (which can be worked around though). Apart from that, it runs very well as a zlib-replacement.

[rmfx]

It's good to see some alternative to the old ref implementation. Code was really not great even if quite stable.

Anyway, on modern projects with active dev, it's time to drop zip for zstd.

[pkunk]

Wow! It is actually ABI-compatible now.

https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/issues/700

This would be a great performance win considering how widely zlib is used.

[oibaf]

See also these:

https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/issues/1572

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/CDNPJ4SOTRQMYVCDI3ZSY4SP4FYESCWD/#CJ4KZBTVEHEJ2TOAIWTMFLMBFNJVIYXL