Linux Firmware Update Utility Fwupd Will Use Zstd Compression for Future Releases
After the XZ backdoor fiasco, now open-source developers are looking for an alternative compression utility, and the obvious choice these days is Zstandard (also known as zstd for short), which provides a lossless data compression algorithm that proves to be faster than XZ when decompressing./p>
Zstandard was developed by Yann Collet at Facebook. Apart from being known for fast compression, it also provides high compression ratios compared to XZ. According to Richard Hughes, the fwupd metadata compressed with zstd is around 3 percent smaller than the one compressed with XZ.