The GNU Project has released package gzip 1.14, which includes utilities gzip, gunzip, zmore, and zcat for data compression and decompression using the LZ77 algorithm. The new release significantly speeds up decompression operations. On x86_64 systems that support PCLMUL processor instructions, performance gains reach 40%, while on systems without PCLMUL support, the gains are up to 20%.
The acceleration is achieved through the optimization of checksum (CRC) operations, which consumed about half of the processor time. The optimized CRC version has already been integrated into the gnulib library, which will lead to performance improvements in other GNU projects utilizing checksum functions.
Compatibility-breaking changes have been made: the installation of the zmore utility has been discontinued on platforms not using the 'more' utility; processing of the GZIP environment variable (which sets default options) has been halted in situations where options '-1' (—fast), '-2', … '-9' (—best), '—rsyncable' or '—synchronous' are not explicitly specified.
Additionally, it is worth noting:
- Release of the utility for searching data in text files — GNU Grep 3.12. The new version resolves the issue with searching in directories containing more than 100,000 files. Support for the option '—unix-byte-offsets' ('-u') has been discontinued. On Windows and AIX platforms in 32-bit mode, support for Unicode characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (codes from 0000 to FFFF) has been implemented.
- Release of the GNU Diffutils 3.12 set, which includes utilities for comparing differences in files, such as diff, diff3, sdiff, and cmp. The new version fixes two bugs: crashes when using 'diff -y' and problems with 'diff -r' when comparing non-empty and empty files.
- Release of the GNU Coreutils 9.7, which includes essential system utilities such as sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. The new version adds support for musl and uclibc-based systems in the logname utility. Other than that, only bug fixes affecting the cat, cksum, dd, ls, timeout, sleep, tail, and who utilities are noted.
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