The GNU Project has released gzip 1.14, which includes the gzip, gunzip, zmore, and zcat utilities for compressing and decompressing data using the LZ77 algorithm. The new release significantly accelerates decompression operations. On x86_64 systems that support PCLMUL processor instructions, the performance gain reaches 40%, and on systems without PCLMUL support, up to 20%.
The speedup is achieved by optimizing checksum (CRC) operations, which used to take up about half of the CPU time. An optimized version of CRC has already been added to the gnulib library, which will speed up other GNU projects that use checksum functions.
Changes that break compatibility: Stopped installing the zmore utility on platforms that do not use the "more" utility; Stopped processing the GZIP environment variable (sets default options) in situations where the "-1" (--fast), "-2", ... "-9" (--best), "--rsyncable", or "--synchronous" options are not explicitly specified.
Additionally, you can note:
- GNU Grep 3.12, a utility for organizing data searches in text files, has been released. The new version resolves an issue with searching directories containing more than 100 files. Support for the "--unix-byte-offsets" ("-u") option has been discontinued. On platforms Windows and AIX in 32-bit mode supports Unicode characters that are outside the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (codes 0000 through FFFF).
- GNU Diffutils 3.12 is released, including utilities for evaluating file differences, such as diff, diff3, sdiff, and cmp. The new version fixes two bugs: a crash when using "diff -y" and problems with "diff -r" when comparing a non-empty file with an empty file.
- GNU Coreutils 9.7 is released, which includes sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, and ls. The new version adds support for systems based on the musl and uclibc C libraries to the logname utility. Otherwise, the only bug fixes are those affecting the cat, cksum, dd, ls, timeout, sleep, tail, and who utilities.
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