A new Zstd kernel implementation based on Zstd v1.5 upstream has been merged into Linux 6.2 which is under development to provide better performance and reliability for Zstd compression/decompression use cases ranging from compressed firmware to transparent filesystem compression.

The Linux kernel already uses Zstd in several modules, from transparent filesystem compression and data compression like Btrfs, to allowing kernel modules to use the Zstandard algorithm for compression.

It is said that the Zstd code in the Linux kernel has not been updated for a year, and it is still using Zstd 1.4.10, which is several years behind the update progress of upstream Zstd. In Linux 6.2, the Zstd kernel code has been updated for v1.5.2 upstream to align with the upstream code maintained by Facebook/Meta. For kernel users using Zstandard compression algorithm, this means they can use faster Zstd compression/decompression.

This project was proposed a long time ago, and the maintainer finally submitted a PR this past weekend. Just today, Linus Torvalds merged the patch.The PR is still byThis is done by Zstd maintainer Nick Terrell from Facebook, who has been actively updating the code from upstream for Zstd used by the Linux kernel.

There is no doubt that using the new Zstd implementation will lead to better performance for Zstd-compressed kernel images and other users. With this kernel implementation also being generated from the upstream Zstd code in a near-automatic fashion, hopefully the kernel implementation will be better updated against its upstream.