Zstd Compression For EROFS Published: Better Than LZ4 But Higher CPU Costs

As noted recently, EROFS has been exploring Zstd compression support for this open-source read-only Linux file-system. Today the patch was posted for enabling Zstandard use.

Gao Xiang with Alibaba has published the 331 lines of code for enabling Zstd compression with EROFS. This is to be the 4th supported compression algorithm for EROFS. Testing by EROFS developers have shown better compression than the default LZ4 but at higher CPU overhead.

For now this Zstd compression support for EROFS is considered experimental and could also be further enhanced in the future by implementing one-shot or buffer-less decompression capabilities.

More details for those interested via the kernel mailing list. The EROFS read-only file-system continues to be popular for mobile use as well as container/embedded environments.