Gzip 1.14 released earlier today as the first new release to this widely-used file compression format on Linux systems and other platforms.
Gzip 1.14 has been nearly two years in the making but has just a handful of bug fixes and some other minor alterations. Most notable for users is Gzip 1.14 delivering faster decompression performance on Intel and AMD x86_64 CPUs:
“gzip now decompresses significantly faster by computing CRCs via a slice by 8 algorithm, and faster yet on x86-64 platforms that support pclmul instructions.”
PCLMUL has been around since the Intel Westmere days or on the AMD side since Bulldozer. So basically if your Intel/AMD Linux system is within the past decade or decade and a half old, it will likely have PCLMUL for Carry-Less Multiplication Quadword.
The original patches working on this PCLMUL implementation for Gzip note around a 13% time reduction during decompression.
Those interested in the few other changes of Gzip 1.14 can find the list of patches and download links via the release announcement.
