Arch Linux Developers that changed the packet packing scheme from the algorithm. Previously, the xz algorithm (.pkg.tar.xz) was used. Now zstd (.pkg.tar.zst) is involved. This made it possible to increase the decompression speed by 1300% at the cost of a slight increase in the size of the packages themselves (about 0,8%). This will speed up the process of installing and updating packages on the system.
At the moment, it is said that 545 packages are being transferred to zstd. The rest will gradually receive a new compression algorithm as updates are released. It is important to note that packages in the .pkg.tar.zst format are automatically supported with updates to pacman (5.2) and libarchive (3.3.3-1). If any of the users have not yet updated libarchive, then the new version is available in a separate repository.
The zstd (zstandard) algorithm was developed in 2015 and first introduced a year later. It provides lossless compression and focuses on faster compression and decompression than usual. In this case, the compression ratio should be comparable or exceed the existing solutions. As noted, the zstd 0.6 version at the maximum compression ratio showed a result similar to boz, yxz, tornado. At the same time, it outperformed lza, brotli and bzip2.
Source: 3dnews.ru